Softraid raid 611/10/2022 ![]() In addition to having multiple backups, I add a new drive every few years and retire one of the older drives. Another set of drives is in my basement in a fire safe and a third I keep in my detached garage. I have one next to the computer for frequent backups and ease of use. Individual hard drives serve that purpose and are relatively low cost. One should be unconnected and in a remote protected area. You really need to consider storage on at least 2 completely isolated systems. The risks might be low but it can be affected by hardware or operator error. No matter how many disks are included, a RAID should be considered as a single backup. It seems you lost some data the last time you tried a RAID. Softraid raid 6 portable#I keep a lot of redundant backups via cheaper portable SanDisk SSDs. Not cheap, but fast and highly portable, and it is bye-bye forever to hard disks. Softraid raid 6 full#Later this year I am upgrading to the 16TB SSD Thunderblade array from OWC (link below) to be used in RAID 0 configuration that will offer the full 16TB capacity. SSD will be very expensive for RAID 5/6 especially if your Terabyte requirements are high. Any thoughts about OWC? Their 4 bay raid 5 Thunderbay seems more novice friendly tho I could be totally wrong. The Synology enclosure (Server?) looks great but wonder how user friendly for a novice on a Mac. I appreciate you taking the time but I am beginning to think the most important thing will be to get a raid setup that is made for dummies. I understood only part of your kind reply. Unfortunately Synology is practically enforcing use of their ridiculously overpriced Toshiba drives with firmware in their higher grade NAS (newer xs and 22 series). You can get better NAS with Xeon CPUs, but that might be beyond your needs. Softraid raid 6 mac#Take a look at the Synology DS1621+/DS1821+ or QNAP TS-473A/673A/873A as relatively inexpensive NAS with good performance, slots for 10GbE cards (IIRC MAC uses 10GBASE-T), and support for ECC SO-DIMMS. 1GbE is slow, being more suited to backups than a primary drive for large amounts of photos or videos. If you only use 2.5GbE, then a weaker CPU might be OK, though RAID 6 (RAID-Z2) requires nearly double the processing of RAID 5 (RAID-Z1). Avoid the wimpy ARM processors and look for an Intel or AMD x86-64 CPU if you want to reach anywhere near saturating 10GbE with a parity RAID mode. The CPU and ethernet connection can be performance bottlenecks. I tend to use RAID 5 up to 5 drives and RAID 6 for 8+ drives, but I have fully redundant NAS units so RAID 5 doesn't bother me too much. You don't want any drive that uses SMR rather than CMR. I look for drives with the highest MTBF (2.5M hours), highest annual TBW (usually 550TB), and low UBER (10^-15). Enterprise drives are often less expensive or at least similar to the NAS branded drives. I typically use the Seagate Exos helium drives. If you don't know about Linux file systems, read this for example. Both QNAP and Synology also support the traditional EXT4 file system. Either ZFS or btrfs should allay data integrity concerns, especially if you also use a NAS that supports ECC RAM. Synology supports btrfs as their better file system. QNAP offers QTS and QTS Hero, the latter uses ZFS as their more resilient file system. I have multiple NAS units, 3x QNAP, 3x Synology and home-built with FreeNAS. I think SSD drives are the future but suspect the price will make me not choose that medium for the time being. Any specific good deals now are appreciated. I don't think enterprise drives are worth the money, but am looking for recommendations as to what makes sense form others who have likely plowed this ground before me. I think I am ready to try it again and am divided between getting a four drive enclosure for a raid 5 setup or trying for even more redundancy and getting raid 6 (assume a 6 or 8 drive enclosure is called for there. I have shied away from raid for a long time due to an incident I had many years ago where I had some data loss. Therefore, I was thinking of getting a raid 5 or raid 6 setup to use with my new Mac Studio (getting in May). My thought is that my cheap 16TB external is not very fast but will likely serve as a backup for a while as I have about 8TB of photos I want to backup. I have one 16 TB drive and an assortment of smaller hard drives and use Backblaze for my offsite backups. I am currently using external hard drives. ![]()
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