Build A Raid Storage Unit For Your Studio Cheap!
Todd Simpson
Feb 6 2014, 10:36 PM
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I wanted to share a bit of kit I cam upon recently that is just SPIFF. I've got wads of old 1 terrabyte and 500 gb external drives and I wanted a larger drive with more speed!! So after intense research, I came up with a solution!!! MAKE A RAID!!

For about U.S. $120 you can buy a

SANS DIGITAL TowerRAID TR4U+B JBOD 4 x SATA 3.5" Drive Bays 4 Bay SATA to USB 3.0 JBOD Enclosure
which is just a box that holds four hard drives. You pull the drives out of your old external hard drives and put them in this. Then you connect it USB 2.0 or USB 3.0 to your computer and bam!! You have a much bigger drive (shows as one drive in mac and windows) that you can connect usb and get killer speed from since all the drives work at once. Here are some pics!!!

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Todd Simpson
Feb 7 2014, 06:28 AM
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I completed the job! smile.gif

THE NUMBERS:

*3.5 TERRABYTES of Storage
*USB 2.0


I pulled the drives out of four external drive units that I wasn't using anymore. Put all of them in this enclosure and bam! The enclosure doesn't require tools. You just slide the drives in. smile.gif Easy as pie! And Cheap!!!

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wrk
Feb 7 2014, 09:10 AM
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QUOTE (Todd Simpson @ Feb 7 2014, 06:28 AM) *
THE NUMBERS:

*3.5 TERRABYTES of Storage
*USB 2.0

cool, a RAID is a great thing. I guess with 4 drives you have 3.5T TOTAL storage with no redundancy, right?

Maybe you have, but you should consider to have at least a RAID 1 (or up) setup to have at least one level of redundancy. This will ofc cut you storage space in half with each level. A RAID 0 setup (no level of redundancy) is practical and will give you one big drive with better performance, but it is a dangerous thing, especially if you work with old spare disks! In case one disk dies you will loose your data of all four disks.






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Todd Simpson
Feb 8 2014, 02:21 AM
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I ended up "un raiding it" so it's just four drives in one enclosure. It's just a backup unit to backup my actual RAID drives that I use during production. I had my backup drives each in their own enclsoures and it seemed handy to put them all in one place under one power supply. It takes up a lot space and only one power cable to deal with. smile.gif So as a "drive consolidator" it's working great!

QUOTE (wrk @ Feb 7 2014, 03:10 AM) *
cool, a RAID is a great thing. I guess with 4 drives you have 3.5T TOTAL storage with no redundancy, right?

Maybe you have, but you should consider to have at least a RAID 1 (or up) setup to have at least one level of redundancy. This will ofc cut you storage space in half with each level. A RAID 0 setup (no level of redundancy) is practical and will give you one big drive with better performance, but it is a dangerous thing, especially if you work with old spare disks! In case one disk dies you will loose your data of all four disks.

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wrk
Feb 8 2014, 01:38 PM
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QUOTE (Todd Simpson @ Feb 8 2014, 02:21 AM) *
I ended up "un raiding it" so it's just four drives in one enclosure. It's just a backup unit to backup my actual RAID drives that I use during production. I had my backup drives each in their own enclsoures and it seemed handy to put them all in one place under one power supply. It takes up a lot space and only one power cable to deal with. smile.gif So as a "drive consolidator" it's working great!

Whoo, didn’t know about another main RAID. I guess you can consider yourself secure now .. LOL

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Todd Simpson
Feb 9 2014, 07:41 PM
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I use two raids for production (one for audio and one for video) striped RAID 0 for speed. I use the 4 drive box in this thread as a backup box so that if any of the raids goes down I can just keep working smile.gif I've never been a fan of using raids for redundancy personally as you take a performance hit when it's rebuilding or have to step away entirely in some cases. So I stripe production raids at Raid 0 and use single disk units for back up.

I have noticed that many folks have no backup strategy or plan and sometimes get sorta caught in the middle when they have a drive failure. having worked in I.T. I've seen so many people lose all their data that it put the fear of God in me long ago smile.gif


QUOTE (wrk @ Feb 8 2014, 07:38 AM) *
Whoo, didn’t know about another main RAID. I guess you can consider yourself secure now .. LOL

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wrk
Feb 10 2014, 09:47 AM
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QUOTE (Todd Simpson @ Feb 9 2014, 07:41 PM) *
I use two raids for production (one for audio and one for video) striped RAID 0 for speed. I use the 4 drive box in this thread as a backup box so that if any of the raids goes down I can just keep working smile.gif I've never been a fan of using raids for redundancy personally as you take a performance hit when it's rebuilding or have to step away entirely in some cases. So I stripe production raids at Raid 0 and use single disk units for back up.

I have noticed that many folks have no backup strategy or plan and sometimes get sorta caught in the middle when they have a drive failure. having worked in I.T. I've seen so many people lose all their data that it put the fear of God in me long ago smile.gif


How do you synchronise your production and backup disks, do you have it scheduled somehow or is manually manageable for your use?

I’m in lesser need of storage space now as i used to need when i was doing photo retouch work in the fashion industry. It was always a hassle to copy huge amount of data back and forth and keep it synchronised and backuped. I work mainly on macs and Time Machine does the job just fine.

A co-worker of mine is having one of these Pegasus-Thunderbold RAIDs .. out of my budget and needs, but the performance is just impressive ohmy.gif



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Todd Simpson
Feb 12 2014, 02:35 AM
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I use an app called SYNC FOLDERS which is handy but there are wads of apps available that provide automated backup. I don't use the native backup in the mac os, instead I just use a separate drive, with a automated copy/sync. In the even of a drive failure, I just switch to working from the backup and order another drive smile.gif

I don't copy back and forth really, just synch a backup so it just adds or deletes the files that changed. Not the entire disk/directory. It's transparent so zero hassle smile.gif

I don't use time machine simply because the files are no longer directly accessible and require a restoration process which is the last thing I want to wait on under a deadline on a given project.

Oddly, I"ve noticed some folks actually time machine backup to the same disk they are booting/working from which is entirely pointless for protecting against hardware failure. If the drive goes, your backup would go with it. Yet, people.....

But time machine is handy for handling backups in the background and provided it's done an external drive it's more than fine for most. Whatever works right?

Todd


QUOTE (wrk @ Feb 10 2014, 03:47 AM) *
How do you synchronise your production and backup disks, do you have it scheduled somehow or is manually manageable for your use?

I’m in lesser need of storage space now as i used to need when i was doing photo retouch work in the fashion industry. It was always a hassle to copy huge amount of data back and forth and keep it synchronised and backuped. I work mainly on macs and Time Machine does the job just fine.

A co-worker of mine is having one of these Pegasus-Thunderbold RAIDs .. out of my budget and needs, but the performance is just impressive ohmy.gif

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