is there any idea about data and hard drives arrangement?

kenny1999

Member
hi , I currently have three 3.5 internal hard drives with a total of 5TB storage (1T+2T+2T), one 2.5 portable 1T hard drive, and one 3.5 desktop external hard drive which is 3T, summing up a total 9TB

In the foreseen future, I am planning to boost the amount of data, I think 50T or even 100T won't be enough for me, I am 99% of the time a home user so I have no experience about how other people or professionals deal with large amount of data.

I'd like to know, what I should do?? Just continue adding more 3.5 internal drive or portable/external drive and that's it? Any different way to implement a storage for large amount of data? I guess the largest capacity hard drive now is only 4T or 8T isn't it? 100T maybe just an estimation and it 's probably more.

How does commercial or more advanced user suit large amount of hard drives?
 
When you get into that amount of storage, you want something dedicated to be able to handle it. Heat may not be an issue in your case now, but it will be; physical space, too.

Best bet is to start researching Server options now, that way you'll have something designed for cooling multiple drives and your system is freed up from having to handle a lot of the background processing. They can get very pricey very quick, though - how soon and at what rate are you looking to start ramping up the storage capacity? Are you planning on getting something that can hold a massive amount of drives right off the bat, or will you do it in spurts and either upgrade/expand the hardware as-needed? I guess a better way to ask that is do you want to spend a ton of money getting a huge system now, or a few hundred on something like a WD MyCloud and worry about future expansion when you need to?

Just curious, but what is it you're going to be storing that requires that much space?
 
You'll probably want to look into getting some kind of NAS. It's basically a dedicated file server, and you can grab a consumer-grade box reasonably cheap these days. I don't have any personal experience with these, though; if you're feeling adventurous, you could build your own file server
 
Depends on your level of comfort and where you want to go with it. A good Synology NAS box would probably be the best bet for you if you want some sort of out of the box or easy functionality. Then you load it up with drives and just sit it on the network and move your data through a mounted share or whatever other mechanism you prefer. The unit itself would manage the underlying RAID or similar if you wanted to have a certain degree of fault tolerance.

Alternatively you could roll your own 'file server' type of box like what's in my sig, but then you have to manually set up and manage the hardware, OS, partitions, file systems, RAID mechanism, application services, etc.
 
Thanks imsati hackapelite and beers for the reply.

It looks like a very complicated issue. But, first , isn't NAS something about networking? I don't actually need an online solution, most of the data are accessed offline without needing to send out through the web.

second, is there any articles which is helpful for me to learn? I don't even have a picture about what I should do next.

I know that my data is going to expand but I don't necessarily need all data to have a backup solution in case of drive failure, but possibly 10% of the data which is very critical.
 
NAS just stands for Network Attached Storage. It's like a media server without the server cost. You connect it to your router and you can access it from any PC on your network and even from anywhere on the internet (if you enable that feature). It's the ideal solution for large amounts of data storage.

You can implement RAID 5 or RAID10 with these NAS devices to help prevent data loss.
 
Another perk of a NAS is you can access it from multiple devices. Say you have a laptop, desktop, and a tablet, you can access your content from any of those devices.

RAID and NAS are not even similar, one is a device and the other is a method of mirroring/striping drives.
 
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