how to implement a small home storage center

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kenny1999

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I have been hearing about RAID and NAS for years but I don't have any knowledge about them. I am getting more and more harddrives and files and I start to be more concerned about data loss on possible hard disk failures in the next moment.

I'd like to know, how to start with all these things? are they something very difficult for home users??
 
kenny1999 said:
Budget? Isn't RAID is an array of replicated inexpensive disks?

I have been buying a lot of 3.5 internal hard disks for home use over the years so hard disks itself may not be an issue. I'd like to know if it's expensive to implement RAID system??

THank you
Click to expand...
Expensive? Not necessarily.

What types and sizes of drives do you have? For RAID, you should use identical drives, such as all 2TB SATA drives. If you have a mix of drives, 500GB, 1TB, 4TB, 750GB, etc. RAID is not for you unless you buy different drives.

Most motherboards support RAID, so you shouldn't need to buy a dedicated RAID controller.

A NAS is different, it's a physical device that is used for network storage.
 
Geoff said:
Expensive? Not necessarily.

What types and sizes of drives do you have? For RAID, you should use identical drives, such as all 2TB SATA drives. If you have a mix of drives, 500GB, 1TB, 4TB, 750GB, etc. RAID is not for you unless you buy different drives.

Most motherboards support RAID, so you shouldn't need to buy a dedicated RAID controller.

A NAS is different, it's a physical device that is used for network storage.
Click to expand...

I don't necessarily need to access the data online.
What I need the most urgent is to have a backup solution to the data in case of hard drive failure and the possibility to expand the storage, at least not limited to the few slots on my chassis.

What do you recommend?

I now have
Hard drive 1TBx1
Hard drive 2TBx2

If I am going to buy 4TB hard drive, does it mean the 2TB and 1TB drive will have nothing to do with the 4TB hard drive when it comes to talking about RAID?

In addition to the same capacity, do they have to be the same brand?
 
They do not have to be the same brand but they need to be the same size. Did you read up on the different types of raid you can have? Sounds like you may want raid 0+1 or 1+0. Depending on how you want it set up. You would need at least 4 drives.
 
johnb35 said:
They do not have to be the same brand but they need to be the same size. Did you read up on the different types of raid you can have? Sounds like you may want raid 0+1 or 1+0. Depending on how you want it set up. You would need at least 4 drives.
Click to expand...


hi . I didn't read anything about RAID in details but my first impression is that it can be a very difficult and confusing issue to new comers, if I only want to implement a backup solution in case of drive failure, which RAID should I learn? I don't want to learn too much to mess things.

Um... And so, I've got 1TBx1 and 2TBx2 which contain the most critical data, and does it mean there is no way to make them compatible to the RAID system if I want to make all my hard drives in RAID are 4T?

Btw, is it not very wise to use arrays of 4T hard drives in RAID system? since the cost of failure of a 4T hard drive, from the cost of hardware and the data it may contain, is obviously higher than a 2T hard drive? Am I understood correctly? or does 4T hard drive itself usually have a lower failure rate and better reliability than a 2T hard drive?

(I will not consider about 3T because there might be a lot of other issues)
Thank you
 
You don't need to "learn" RAID. You just need to know what different RAID levels do and then create them.

RAID0 = striped across two or more disks. If one disk fails, you lose everything.
RAID1 = Mirror Backup. If one disk fails, the other takes over, as it is a mirrored copy of the first disk.
RAID5 = Striped parity. Requires 3 or more disks. Has the performance similar to RAID0 but if one disk fails, you just replace it and the data is rebuilt onto the disk.
RAID10 = Combination of RAID0 and RAID1.

Those are the basic consumer level ones. There's also RAID50, RAID60, and RAID100.
 
When you RAID devices, the maximum space you will have is that of the smallest hard drive. For instance if you have a 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB drives in RAID it will act as though you have 3x 1TB drives. If you want to setup RAID, you should have identically sized drives.

Since you already have different size drives though, you could buy new ones for RAID and keep your current ones as standalone drives.
 
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