RAID or Simply "Copy" Files for Backup?

[scr4wl]

Have either of you tried unRAID arrays or looked into that? Seems like the best of both worlds?

Nope, use a combination of hardware raid 6 and 1 arrays at work (with additional backups as well) and at home software raid 1.., but that's it.

 

 

The software raid works great btw, and I dont notice any difference between that and the hardware raid 1 arrays.., although I havent ever had to rebuild the soft array, so dunno how that would go.

 

Quick google of unraid makes it look like a nas os.., could be interesting, but I would need to look into it further to give an opinion.

[Waco]

With the size of drives now raid 6 should be used instead of 5 if you are gonna use parity. Those rebuild times do play a huge factor for when a drive finally fails though...

Rebuild times for consumer drives in light-duty uses don't really matter IMO. Even if it is something like 2-3 days...who cares? The chance of killing the array due to an URE, though? That's a good reason to resort to something like ZFS or BTRFS...but if you must go with hardware RAID, at least use RAID 6.

[potatochobit]

if write speed is not an issue, windows storage pool is good, you can add or remove them at anytime 

 

if they are portable hard drives, then just back them up so you can put other stuff on them 

 

if they are stuck in the same computer forevever and you want a single mirror backup, raid is fine 

 

edit:

btw, if you can afford it you may want to get a little NAS

https://www.amazon.com/QNAP-TS-251-Personal-Transcoding-TS-251-US/dp/B00L8GHOQ8/ref=sr_1_12?ie=UTF8&qid=1500315254&sr=8-12&keywords=nas

 

remember, the most important thing about a good NAS is the quality of the software

you can control the NAS from your iphone app or automatically upload and backup your smart phone photos

or sync files from work to home like dropbox

it even has HDMI output so you can watch your videos straight on a TV

here are some of the apps: 

https://www.qnap.com/en-us/cell_app/

Edited July 17, 2017 by potatochobit