Originally Posted By: StevieC
Ok.. So being the "Media Collector" that I am I have a bank of 8 External USB Hard drives plugged into a USB Hub and connected to my computer. The 8 drives are made up of 4 drives that have Data on them and then an identical or bigger hard drive that backs it up.
The problem is I'm quickly running out of space to store these external boxes and plugs to plug them in so I was thinking of building a cheap little server and loading it up with hard drives and just connect them to a RAID-1 (mirror) controller card.
Thoughts and suggestions?
Thanks,
That sounds like a terrific idea. I have a box similar to that sitting here at home from which all of our media is accessed by one of the Mac or Linux boxen throughout the house. The server is mounted via SSH at boot time. I use rsync to back the server up to a large external drive, and all important stuff gets synced with an Amazon S3 account in the cloud.
On the other hand, if you want to just throw money at the problem, there's always
Drobo, which seems automagic.
If your concerns about data redundancy are because you're worried about losing music and other replaceable stuff, but do not want the down time inherent in a drive failure, then RAID 1 is sufficient; but really important stuff, in my opinion at least, should always be replicated somewhere *off site*, as RAID 1 does not protect against floods, fires, power anomalies, pets and children.
I had a VPS server get wiped a few months ago. The company, in their profuse apology to their clients, explained that a malicious individual got into their main virtual machine node and wiped the data *and* the (physically connected) backups. Data recovery was impossible, as the filesystems themselves had been buggered.
I always tell people buying computers to stop thinking about the hardware as the value -- Today, these cheaply built desktops and laptops are expendable commodities... It is the *data* that we need to begin thinking of as having the value.
