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>You probably need a NAS. To store 10TB securely you are looking at a bill of materials of about ~1200usd. For just 10TB, I would recommend that most home use

by jasode 10y ago

>You probably need a NAS. To store 10TB securely you are looking at a bill of materials of about ~1200usd. For just 10TB, I would recommend that most home users stay away from RAID and buy 3 Seagate 10TB drives (street price currently $399 each) for total of ~$1200. Use 1 drive as primary copy and the 2 others as backups. With 3 drives, you could even rotate the 2 backups to an offsite location. I quit using RAID in 2007. All of them FreeNAS/drobo/Synology/etc required more troubleshooting and babysitting than I wanted to deal with. It didn't matter if it was Linux software or dedicated hardware (NAS appliance).

TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
The advantage of a NAS is that the file system works equally transparently on OS X, Windows, and Linux. Attached drives can't do that. (Not easily and reliably, anyway.) You may not need that feature, but it's a very useful option to have. The downside for media storage is that a straight NAS is often incredibly slow compared to USB3. For decent speed you need iSCSI, which adds cost and complication.
RandomOpinion 10y ago
>"For just 10TB, I would recommend that most home users stay away from RAID and buy 3 Seagate 10TB drives (street price currently $399 each) for total of ~$1200. Use 1 drive as primary copy and the 2 others as backups. With 3 drives, you could even rotate the 2 backups to an offsite location." And how do you plan to detect if your data is silently corrupted? Unless you're using some archive file format that includes checksums/hashes, you have no way of knowing whether your backups are any good until it's too late.
- jasode 10y ago
  Your tone makes it sound like silent RAID corruption doesn't happen. That's not true, even for NAS appliances like Synology.[1] If you meant that a filesystem like ZFS with checksum blocks is designed to protect itself agains corruption errors, one can use that without RAID. A single-disk ZFS is orthogonal to RAID. To point back to the OP's question, he's running Windows with Plex. In that case, a 10TB NTFS filesystem with periodic binary comparisons/checksums (or format the disk with the newer ReFS[2] that stores checksums similar to ZFS) is simpler than RAID5/6. He also gets the extra benefit of an offsite backup without paying for cloud storage. I'm not against RAID for all cases but a home media computer with just 10TB doesn't meet the threshold of dealing with its extra complexity. However, if one is wanting to consolidate 25TB+ of disk space -- or running a business -- or need aggregated io bandwidth, the cost/benefit drivers for RAID over JBOD would make more sense. [1]https://www.google.com/search?q=raid+data+corruption+synology https://www.google.com/search?q=raid+data+corruption+synolog... [2]http://www.windowscentral.com/how-use-resilient-file-system-refs-windows-10 http://www.windowscentral.com/how-use-resilient-file-system-...

by jasode 10y ago

TheOtherHobbes 10y ago

The advantage of a NAS is that the file system works equally transparently on OS X, Windows, and Linux. Attached drives can't do that. (Not easily and reliably, anyway.) You may not need that feature, but it's a very useful option to have. The downside for media storage is that a straight NAS is often incredibly slow compared to USB3. For decent speed you need iSCSI, which adds cost and complication.

RandomOpinion 10y ago

>"For just 10TB, I would recommend that most home users stay away from RAID and buy 3 Seagate 10TB drives (street price currently $399 each) for total of ~$1200. Use 1 drive as primary copy and the 2 others as backups. With 3 drives, you could even rotate the 2 backups to an offsite location." And how do you plan to detect if your data is silently corrupted? Unless you're using some archive file format that includes checksums/hashes, you have no way of knowing whether your backups are any good until it's too late.

jasode 10y ago
Your tone makes it sound like silent RAID corruption doesn't happen. That's not true, even for NAS appliances like Synology.[1] If you meant that a filesystem like ZFS with checksum blocks is designed to protect itself agains corruption errors, one can use that without RAID. A single-disk ZFS is orthogonal to RAID. To point back to the OP's question, he's running Windows with Plex. In that case, a 10TB NTFS filesystem with periodic binary comparisons/checksums (or format the disk with the newer ReFS[2] that stores checksums similar to ZFS) is simpler than RAID5/6. He also gets the extra benefit of an offsite backup without paying for cloud storage. I'm not against RAID for all cases but a home media computer with just 10TB doesn't meet the threshold of dealing with its extra complexity. However, if one is wanting to consolidate 25TB+ of disk space -- or running a business -- or need aggregated io bandwidth, the cost/benefit drivers for RAID over JBOD would make more sense. [1]https://www.google.com/search?q=raid+data+corruption+synology https://www.google.com/search?q=raid+data+corruption+synolog... [2]http://www.windowscentral.com/how-use-resilient-file-system-refs-windows-10 http://www.windowscentral.com/how-use-resilient-file-system-...