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looking for a recommendation on a RAID or backup solution

post #1 of 7
12/15/12 at 8:55am
Thread Starter 
Hi. I'm looking for a recommendation for a RAID or backup solution for my existing setup. My setup is very straight forward. I have a HP Proliant N40L server running WHS 2011. I currently have 3 of the 5 storage bays filled with 3TB WD hard drives. The 4th Bay is open, and the I have a Blu-Ray drive in the optical disk bay. Setup is used for ripping my Blu-Ray collection to .MKV files and used with MyMovies and a Dune Player. The only software I run on the server is MakeMKV and MyMovies for WHS to catalog the rips.

I'm a newbie when it comes to RAID and backup. What I would like is to be able to add a 4th Hard Drive to the setup as a backup for the other 3..so If any of the other ones failed, I wont loose the .MKVs stored on it. Can this be done with software on my current setup? or is something more elaborate needed?
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post #2 of 7
12/20/12 at 4:52am
Thread Starter 
any thoughts/suggestions appreciated.
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post #3 of 7
12/20/12 at 6:50am
Not really familiar with WHS so I might be wrong here but I don't think it does RAID at least in the normal way most other NAS do because it's really just a PC OS with custom front end. You need to get a RAID controller which operates independent of the OS just like you would on a PC. Some more details on this site and check the bios of the PC (N40L) and see if has a RAID controller built in, flip it from IDE/ACHI to RAID.

You would need backups of everything before going down that route as creating the RAID array will erase the HDD's.
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post #4 of 7
12/20/12 at 7:16am
Raid is used for prevention of data loss from hard drive failure. It is not a means of backup. If your raid array data was corrupted, there is no mechanism to restore it. If a raid drive dies, it will still operate while you replace it without data loss.

Raid can be implemented in hardware or software. One is not "better" than the other. Generally, hardware raid is faster though, as a hardware raid controller has dedicated hardware to do the necessary parity creation and checking to offload from the main processor in your system.

In either a hardware or software Raid scenario, you will probably have to reformat the drives that are included in the array first. Hardware raid would be the most expensive way for you to go. Windows 8 has software raid built in (storage pools) that is very effective and much better than WHS.

Please invest in a backup solution as well. Try Crashplan for a good one at low cost.
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post #5 of 7
12/24/12 at 6:19am
Thread Starter 
So you would backup close to 9TB of MKV's with crashplan? Any other recommendations? Not certain why you are saying RAID isn't what I want?
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post #6 of 7
12/24/12 at 6:35am
I am saying you should have both raid and backup. I have over 20TB backed up to Crashplan right now.
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post #7 of 7
12/26/12 at 7:48am
I agree RAID is not backup and ideally you'd use both things.

That said, check your upload speed before trying a cloud solution. I've got 18TB of disk, and last I checked it'd take like a year and a half to upload it all to crashplan.... DL speed is often 10-50 times higher than upload speed for many high speed internet connections.
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