RAID enclosure recommendations?

Mr. Analog · December 22, 2014, 09:40:21 PM

I'm looking for an easy to use RAID enclosure I can set up mirroring on without a proprietary disk format

I have used the Drobo for many years, today I had some issues with it and now one out of the two Windows 7 machines I have can't seem to mount the volumes anymore (god only knows why) anyway, I realized that the Drobo itself is a single point of failure, if it goes 4+ TB worth of incremental backups are gone

So I'm looking for options (specifically Windows-based options)

Lazybones · December 22, 2014, 10:05:48 PM

So you want a windows server case?

Mr. Analog · December 22, 2014, 11:50:53 PM

I just want an enclosure I can hook up to a Windows box. I know HP makes one but I wanted to see what kind of suggestions you guys had

Lazybones · December 23, 2014, 12:47:24 AM

Quote from: Mr. Analog on December 22, 2014, 11:50:53 PM
I just want an enclosure I can hook up to a Windows box. I know HP makes one but I wanted to see what kind of suggestions you guys had

I would suggest a NEW case that just has enough drive bays in it... OR a NAS device that uses more standard raid methods.

Tom · December 23, 2014, 10:38:11 PM

One thing to consider is that RAID != backups. If you really need it to store backups, make sure you also have another backup copy. Like I had /planned/ lol.

I saw some NAS enclosures this year that intrigued me, but I can't remember what they are now

Maybe QNap or Synology? I can't remember. Some started getting somewhat affordable ($400~ for the case alone rather than $900+)

Mr. Analog · December 24, 2014, 11:32:57 AM

I can see a lot of options for repairing RAID 1 setups, my main problem is data backup in case of damage to the array controller which has happened to me twice in the last 10-15 years. Oddly I've never encountered drive failure but I've had controllers die and corruption.

The chicken and egg problem I have is I want to make sure content is backed up but I also have a lot of content, if I put the trust into individual drives I'm inviting disaster but if I trust an array I could lose access to the content if the array is damaged or fails

The option I'll have to run with is manual backups to multiple drives and there aren't a lot of appliances out there at the consumer level that do it

Mags · December 24, 2014, 11:53:36 AM

Qnap does seem to be the best rated nas if you want to pay the premium.

Mr. Analog · December 24, 2014, 12:17:08 PM

Quote from: Mags on December 24, 2014, 11:53:36 AM
Qnap does seem to be the best rated nas if you want to pay the premium.

Like Drobo it looks like it has a proprietary RAID

I think I'll just stick with what I got, I'll just buy some spare drives and set up regular backups via docking station

Lazybones · December 24, 2014, 04:48:47 PM

Build your own enclosure and run http://www.openmediavault.org/ on it..

It will use a very standard linux software raid which is very portable between linux systems...

In my setup I had been using a regular Ubuntu setup, unmounted the drives,, move them to an http://www.openmediavault.org/ setup which is based on Debian, just mounted the raid set.

linux MD raid marks the disks fairly well so as long as you put ALL the disks back in a new linux box it should mount them.

Mr. Analog · December 25, 2014, 09:49:52 AM

Nice! Thanks for that

Melbosa · December 26, 2014, 12:31:24 AM

You all know my horrors with the Drobo... but until now I was the only one I knew with issues.

Synology has been solid for me as a NAS, and I've proven that they store their RAID data on the disks like a proper raid as you can literally buy a bigger Synology NAS, pull your drives and put them in the new one and the RAID is in tact. Nice that way (and the way it should be).

Unfortunately that option wasn't there for the Drobo. Had to be the same model when my controller died

. Silly Drobo lol.

Lazy's options are awesome as well. I'll used it myself in the past, but went with the Blackbox NAS' just cause I found them just easy to use and smaller footprint than the computer case.

Anyway, sorry to hear your woes... know I've been there and I know it sux. Good news if you call Drobo they can recover your data for minimal costs (plus your shipping).

Mr. Analog · December 26, 2014, 09:54:30 AM

I didn't lose any data but it made me think about backups

I'm running out of drive space anyway so changing NAS to something more expandible may be the way to go

Lazybones · December 26, 2014, 12:15:49 PM

There is no perfect solution. QNAP and Synology are great stand alone options vs a Drobo.

There are several NAS build your own distros like openmediavault and Freenas that make the build your own setup not too difficult. I only suggest openmediavault since it uses Linux and well understood md raid that both Tom or myself can probably assist with if there was trouble. There are also a bunch of one click plugins / packages for openemediavault like mumble servers, Plex and other things.

Melbosa · December 26, 2014, 02:37:43 PM

And if you gets bigger storage nas (home built or black box)I have s wack of 1tb drives that Tom never bought from me sitting doing nothing 😉

Mr. Analog · December 26, 2014, 03:21:58 PM

Well now that sounds just about perfect