I'm totally agreeing with you TeknoJnky. There is stuff I could loose and there are things I can't loose. The ones that are really important to me are backed up and daily basis. But for example movie collection can be easily downloaded again if needed right? When I started with 6x1TB I was considering dual redundancy but I decided to get more space. So far it was good call, still I'm aware that I'm more vulnerable to disaster then you with dual redundancy. I'm not considering Nas as a Backup solution but storage.
I think with 6 x 4TB drives in there would give me quite a lot of storage for a couple of years.... and it could be a while before 5TB drives are mainstream anyway...?
With regards to doing the factory default thing... say you do that to your system, what happens with all the data on the drives?
that 15GB was just a hypothetical.... as I'm looking at having the ReadyNAS Pro 6 with either 6x3TB or 6x4TB drives..... so I'm assuming that dual redundancy is the best way to go from what I've read on here?
So with 6x3TB or 6x4TB drives, with dual redundancy, what's the easy way to work out the true capacity you'll be able to utilize?
Thanks, that makes perfect sense. So that means that if two drives failed, you don't loose any data... I know that's probably a rare event to happen (safely using a good UPS of course)...
14884gb is actually about 14.5TB. The GB measurements shown in Frontview treat 1KB = 1024 bytes, so your calculations should show 14884 / 1024 = 14.54 TB. Using 1KB = 1000 bytes you'd get 14884 / 1000^3 * 1024^3 / 1000 = 15.98TB. The overheads are actually quite minimal, it's the differences in measurement units that explain most of the discrepancy. Of course there is a 4GB OS partition on each of the disks that is on a separate partition.
My estimate of 11TB in my post above was an overestimate, I had been thinking about number of GB / 1000 too, so i would actually be a bit under 11TB with 6x3TB disks.
cubewebsolutions - That is why the backup solutions are getting more and more difficult. You may want to think about your storage needs with the backups in mind. For many years I had only a single NV+ for my data, but as I added more and more (and the third drive and then the fourth) my previous backup plan which was not consistent became almost untenable. I was manually backing everything up to drives connected to my PC via eSATA. So I added an NVX in June of last year as my primary storage and the NV+ became by backup target. Later, when the prices dropped on the NVX (being discontinued) I added a second NVX for future growth. Each NVX now has 2x3TB and 2x1TB drives, with the second being the target of several rsync backup jobs every night. My backup is thus never more than 24 hours old. The rsync jobs only take minutes.
Unless you need 12TB of storage, you might want to consider two 4 bay units with one backing up the other. The backup target does not have to be as fast as the primary storage, for example you could go with a Pro4 or Ultra 4 Plus as the primary unit and an Ultra 4 as the secondary. The drive set could even then be moved intact from one to another since they are all x-86 system. If you had a problem you were not sure whether it was the chassis or the drives, you could shut down both, remove the drives from the one not having problems, move the drives from the one giving problems in the same order, and reboot. (If you have custom device names, that will go with the disk set. When I moved the drives from NAS1 to the brand new NVX BE, it came up as NAS1 and all my drive maps were intact).
When I upgraded two of my drives from 1TB to 3TB, I did the backup unit first and after a week, I did the primary unit. That gave me time to know there were not any problems with the drives and the backup was intact and stable. Unfortunately for our pocket books, once you reach a certain point in data volume, the only really efficient way to back up is NAS to NAS (IMO) unless you happen to have other large volume and fast backup devices laying around.
I am looking for these drives to use in my Ultra 4+ (4TBx3 in RAID0) that my Pro Business Edition (3TBx6 in Dual Redundancy) backs up to. I know it sounds a little extreme but like PapaBear said with 12TB for all my family pictures, music, movie collection, and all my VM's running on off it for my home lab I can't afford to loose data.
longshot94, using it in RAID-0 if one disk fails all data on the volume is lost. Four RAID-0 volumes would be a good option provided you can split your backups into separate backup jobs with each backing up less than 4TB.
... If you have 15tb of data and no backup, your priorities are totally out of wack! :shock:
I totally disagree. I have a few friends running Readynas pro (one even runs a readynas 3200....) as a server for their highdef library. They don't need backup for this information (if it dies for some reason - it would be a pain in the *** to re-download everything but it is doable and investing in another storage just to backup movies and TV shows is a waste of money) and erasing the entire array is a big problem. AFAIK this is a limitation in the ext utils, hopefully it will be rectified in the near future... (does anyone have any information regarding this really annoying limitation?)
Yes it does. But this is not a critical data. If you lose the entire array you simply re-download a few gigs of data (for the TV shows you didn't get to watch and would like to watch soon...) and queue the rest. Most of us have a 40mbps (or more) line and with a decent Usenet provider it should take about a month or so to re-download everything.
As a side note: The truth is that the 3200/4200 is a total overkill for people who just want to have a large array of disks to store their media files as it sits idle most of the time. I wish Netgear would release an 8 or 10 drive array for people who just need large storage without the CPU power and amount of ram of the larger units.
Two or three 6-bay ReadyNAS units is a much better option than a 3200/4200 for the home. Cheaper and probably less power usage too. Certainly less noisy.
It would be nice to see an 8 or 10 bay unit. I'd be interested in getting one of those.
longshot94, using it in RAID-0 if one disk fails all data on the volume is lost. Four RAID-0 volumes would be a good option provided you can split your backups into separate backup jobs with each backing up less than 4TB.
It's 4TB not 4GB. Similarly 3TB not 3GB.
Yeah I could split it up I guess until my movies folder exceeds 4TB which its getting close. If I loose the volume i will replace the disk, re-create the volume, and copy all the data back on next backup run.
I assume this is a newer revision of the drive in the original post, I will be finding out in a couple days. Buying 2 of them to max out my probusiness with 6x 4tb.
Seagate Backup Plus 4 TB USB 3.0 Desktop External Hard Drive STCA4000100
I added one of these recently for dual redundancy. I think it's an odd 5900Mhz drive. It is slower than the original ones that came in these seagate enclosures, but even with 1GB/s networking the network is the bottleneck so I like the slower cooler drives anyhow.
could be, my plan is to initially add them to my probus, but eventually I want to swap them out to drives matching the existing 4tb hitatchi's, and move the seagates over to my ultra4.
There are two expansion limits. One of them is that you can't expand your volume by more than 8TB over the life of the volume. What was the capacity of the volume when you last did a factory reset?
If your volume is using single-redundancy then you would be running into the limit that you can't expand past 16TB
I had thought I had last defaulted with all 6 drives, but now maybe I am not so sure.
I am using dual redundancy, so if I am hitting a limit, it would be the 8tb expansion limit, volume size should be nearly 15tb instead of 12.
It would have been really great if the error message actually explained more details about what the problem is, instead of just saying expansion failed. But I suppose we won't be seeing any improvement there now.
