How To Store Internal Hard Drives? 393
mike writes "I have been ripping all my movies and TV shows for easy viewing through a media PC. Because I would rather not rip everything again I'm looking for a simple backup solution. I'm considering a hard drive dock and several internal hard drives to use as 'disks' to back things up every once in a while but I don't know what the best way to store internal drives would be in the meantime. Could they sit together in any empty box and be OK, or would a number of externals be worth the slightly higher cost with fewer worries about storing them in the meantime?"
ick, softraid (Score:4, Insightful)
Unless it's one known for its ability to work on various and sundry drives (as opposed to identical ones), and probably built into whatever OS OP is running...don't recommend softraid.
Controller card/motherboard goes, or enough drives go and all his data's gone.
WiebeTech anti-static storage box (Score:2, Insightful)
Point Missed (Score:5, Insightful)
The OP already has the online storage covered. This is regarding using HDD's for offline (not spinning) storage. Even if they're not being accessed and are physically separate from the primary storage, you still are subject to wear (spinning platters) and things like power surges.
Putting the dries back into their orignal enclosures, or perhaps an "OEM Pack" piece of foam (with anti-static bags) may be the best option. Better, consider putting the whole mess into a media-rated fire-safe.
Re:Easy solution (Score:4, Insightful)
If you are not still convinced. Try to imagine how to recover the raid array after one disk dies... Search the net and you'll find a lot of people that was unable to recover arrays because they used cheap hardware.
Because of this I discarded NAS and similar solutions. I have external hard drives and I plug them as I need using USB. Put them away from kids, sun and humidity and they will be fine.
Amazon S3? (Score:3, Insightful)
Find a friend that needs a backup too. (Score:1, Insightful)
I made a deal with a friend of mine. We each keep a backup of each others data. Its an off site fairly up to date replica of all our important data. We each have FTP servers running so everything is always available when needed. Neither of us run a RAID setup anymore. the money saved from not having to buy more disks and controllers allows us both to increase our total storage capacity as well. The chances that we will both have a drive fail or a disaster take out both servers are pretty slim too.
Re:Point Missed (Score:3, Insightful)
When you need to back up, turn on the machine.
When you're done, shut it down.
Offline storage at it's finest.
RAID5 - you're not as protected as you think (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe not directly relevant to the OP's question but since I see a bunch of folks mentioning using RAID, i thought i'd chime in about RAID5 survivability.
RAID5 protects you against one failure in a stripe. if you lose a drive, that's a failure. If you have a read error on a particular sector, that is another failure, and your data is gone.
the probability of a read error *somewhere* on a 1TB drive is actually quite high.
So, you lose a drive, you go to rebuild, you find you have a read error and can't get your data.
This can mean a few things.
1) lose a particular bit of data. Maybe you don't care, if you're archiving DVDs you'll probably cope just fine. If it's important data you'll be sad.
2) can't rebuild your RAID. Some RAID controllers will just give up if they get a read error during a rebuild, so then you have to back up the recoverable portion of your data (probably the vast majority), rebuild the RAID, etc.
I don't know how the various software RAIDs cope with this. I had this happen with a dell/lsilogic hardware raid card.
In my case, the read error was not something i noticed when i backed up and restored the data onto a new raid, but the parity didn't match so it wouldn't rebuild. It very well may have been on an unused portion of the filesystem.
solutions/mitigations:
1) scrub your RAID5's regularly. this process checks everything over and fixes any errors while you still have a full RAID5 set. This will reduce your chance of failure greatly.
2) use RAID6. it adds an extra drive's worth of redundancy.
3) use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive [wikipedia.org] or some similar additional layer of redundancy.
You should also consider running an OS that supports ZFS (FreeBSD, OpenSolaris, Nexenta). It has additional data checksumming that can help. ZFS has software raid built in.
Several good blog posts on this subject here:
http://blogs.sun.com/relling/tags/mttdl [sun.com]
He talks specifically about Solaris & ZFS, but the reliability stuff is generally applicable. RAID-Z is basically equivalent to RAID5; RAID-Z2 is basically RAID6.
Free anti-static bags (Score:3, Insightful)
My approach... (Score:5, Insightful)
I have two home-built servers: one is an always-on, live NAS; the other is a backup server that I power on only to do backups (or restores if it comes to that). First rule I go by: always use the slower 5400 RPM drives, such as the Western Digital "Green" [newegg.com] or the Samsung EcoGreen [newegg.com]. For both media streaming and backup purposes, these hard drives are still plenty fast. The biggest benefit, though, is that they use less energy (particularly important if your system is always on), and don't get as hot, making cooling much easier (which usually also translates to quieter).
My live server is currently 4 x 1TB drives in RAID-5, using Linux software RAID. (I know RAID is no substitute for backup, but I still consider it "quasi" backup. But I also have real backup.) This system is fairly un-interesting: it's your typical DIY NAS.
The backup server is housed in the Norco RPC-4020 [newegg.com]. For $300, you get 24 SATA hot-swap bays. That price is hard to beat. I haven't filled this case up with drives yet, and I have plenty of physical space going forward. The hardware is just some unused spare components I had lying around. Extra SATA ports are provided by the Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 [newegg.com] (which works fine in "regular" 32-bit PCI slots).
This, IMO, is a pretty simple set up. I just power up the backup server whenever I need it, and turn it off when I'm done. I don't care about performance, since backups are always run as a batch job (typically over night).
Before I bought that Norco case, I was just using individual drives with a Thermaltake BlacX [newegg.com] SATA-to-USB hard drive docking station. This is cheaper, just slightly less convenient. I did order 50 "zip lock"-style anti-static bags for $13. I ordered them from staticbags.com [staticbags.com] ("GRC Enterprises" was listed on my invoice). After I copied data to the drive and put it in an anti-static bag, I just added it to the stack of drives I had on my bookshelf. The Norco case definitely looks better! :)
All in all, I consider my system fairly robust. It's only semi-secure against my stupidity, and since its all housed in the apartment, does not safeguard against fire. But since the media rips are just copies of DVDs I actually own, my insurance policy becomes the ultimate backup.
Re:Take your pick (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Easy solution (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Take your pick (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:TPBB (Score:1, Insightful)
Parent should be modded insightful as well as funny. Because, if you take all the worthwhile data the average user produces in her or his lifetime you could probably fit it on one CD or even a floppy (1.4MB ;).
Most data people have is just available and preserved in the cloud, which takes care of it as long as it is popular enough.
Re:Rotate the backups! (Score:3, Insightful)
An awful lot of effort to store (in the article in question) movies and TV shows he'll probably never watch again.
I've never understood the packrat mentality with movies and TV shows... I know people with literally thousands (tens of thousands?) of hours of TV shows and movies - what's the point?