Need some advice on what to get/implement

[Warheitmaker]

Hi all,

So I've been reading around here and other places, and I'm left with some questions best answered by someone more experienced. I'm looking to buy some large storage disks, 3.5" 1-4 TB or so, since I'm thinking I might need it soon. Not for movies, but maybe a large music collection, pictures, etc. Data is semi-important so redundancy is likely desired. I'm currently favoring WD Reds. You find yourself looking for songs/albums you had when you were younger and it becomes harder and harder to find

Anyway, I'd like a separate machine that can run efficiently in terms of kWh consumption. I have an old desktop sitting around with an older i5 - but the mobo and RAM are pretty ancient (non ECC, etc). Maybe I should just sell that and get something newer with more features? Ideally something smaller and lighter. Just storage is OK, but if it could function as a server it would be nice as well.

Not sure if I want to invest in a RAID controller or anything, maybe JBOD + old desktop is all I need. Operating systems - any are fine. I have licenses for the good ones. I realize some external storage NAS products exist, maybe I'd want that. Cheaper and/or effective is best for me. Thanks!

 

[ShrimpBrime]

Anyway, I'd like a separate machine that can run efficiently in terms of kWh consumption. I have an old desktop sitting around with an older i5

You buy into the newest hardware for the best efficiency. So a newer i5 is going to have less power consumption for the same clock speeds.

WD makes great drives. I use WD greens for holding storage with 64mb cache. Run mirror raid 1 for redundancy. One drive dumps, you still have all the information on the other raid drive. you'll have good performance with no parity. Minimum number of drives is 2. More drives = more redundancy.

Really important stuff is good on flash drives. No moving parts makes for excellent redundancy. Wedding pictures, family portraits and such....

 

[Warheitmaker]

I hear ya. I have a 16gb flash drive as well. The problem with the old desktop is... well it being old. The CPU is about the only nice thing left - damn socket changes.

Sounds like you have hardware RAID. I want to try out software RAID first.

 

[cw823]

There are quite a few options if you want to build a NAS, I'd recommend anything that lets you run ZFS.

 

[Janus67]

You buy into the newest hardware for the best efficiency. So a newer i5 is going to have less power consumption for the same clock speeds.

WD makes great drives. I use WD greens for holding storage with 64mb cache. Run mirror raid 1 for redundancy. One drive dumps, you still have all the information on the other raid drive. you'll have good performance with no parity. Minimum number of drives is 2. More drives = more redundancy.

Really important stuff is good on flash drives. No moving parts makes for excellent redundancy. Wedding pictures, family portraits and such....

I personally do not trust flash drives for long-term storage. I've had seen my fair share of flash drives that just die (are no longer recognized) out of nowhere (from various users that I do support for).

Ultimately, backing up to as many locations as possible is the best way to do it. local storage, off-location storage, etc.

 

[Warheitmaker]

I personally do not trust flash drives for long-term storage. I've had seen my fair share of flash drives that just die (are no longer recognized) out of nowhere (from various users that I do support for).

Ultimately, backing up to as many locations as possible is the best way to do it. local storage, off-location storage, etc.

That's certainly true. Just had a sandisk microsd card die, 6 months old hardly. I'll keep my flash drive as a rescue kit. I hear people mentioning ZFS a lot, I'll write that down. Thanks! I've also heard "Everything" is great.

I'll probably keep two copies of anything important - photos, music, documents. Might even put some stuff on cloud, but there aren't any volcanoes/earthquakes/hurricanes here

Found out my mobo is micro ATX, so I can get a cheap smaller case for 30-50$, pop in my old hardware (non modular psu lol...) and I should have a decent homelab solution. Still undecided about the OS, I have Windows 2008 but would really like to toy around with CentOS or Redhat, something like that.

I'll have a 5tb HDD
two 500 GB HDDs
and a 1tb external.