Neater all round, much easier to set up & probably a lot more robust/hassle free in real world use tho’. The VFM looks fine to me. It is not a lot really, for what looks to be fine real world performance for many years to come.
I get the Raspberry Pi thing, but it’s beyond my skill (and interest), so an off the shelf package is best for me, I think.
The DS118 looks good to me, though for an extra £40 or so, the DS218 Play has the same spec and offers a second bay. I like the idea of having that option, even if I start with a single drive.
Are the WD Red/Seagate Ironwolf NAS hard drives worth the premium?
Cheers for that. I was thinking of getting a new NAS. I’ll have to check that out.
Unless you’re backing up multi client with multi streaming and using deduplification, why would you need it?
It’s backup not gaming.
Deduplification…
Surely better not to duplicate in the first place?
That’s not really what it means.
Think duplicated letters across many documents. You don’t need them All, just one and a reference to where ever it was used.
Ah, I see.
Interesting that the reference is less resource intensive than recording the letter itself. I wouldn’t have guessed.
I still don’t really know what I’m going to buy. Hifi is a piece of piss by comparison.
It’s not less resource hungry, that was my point.
If you’re doing a direct copy to backup CPU speed isn’t so important.
If you’re using it as a server, speed helps. Squeezebox server likes the power, especially when doing custom browse queries.
My back up system is tres simple - buy 2 copies.
Agree on the pi - it is great, but only if you want to play.
I would suggest having two drives. It’s probably easiest to use two bays for this, although you can plug usb drives in. I would suggest two active drives (one live, one short term backup), and a USB drive for off site backup. Don’t do raid! Most of the issues that people have with data loss are when we get stuff wrong - we delete a file, or run an incorrect query etc. Raid will simply propagate this kind of error, while a backup every few days gives you some protection from it.
I don’t know the specific drives you mention. I just buy the ones they make the most of. You want a commodity thing, here, not a specialist thing.
Not true, raid is about availability, the two disks appear as one drive and the object is created twice so if a disk fails the other will take over without any loss of data.
I think someone would be crazy not to use raid 1 if the NAS supports it when you have a large music library.
I know what raid 1 does, but I think it’s exactly the wrong thing for this kind of usage. A music library doesn’t need 100% uptime, it needs protection from drunken deletion.
resiliency and backups are completely different things.
I have resiliency to cover hard disk failure and backups to cover drunken deletion failure.
Why go through the hassle of copying 3 TB of audio from the cloud or a backup when a hard disk fails when instead you could just replace it and carry on listening as if nothing happened?
that depends on the failure mode. Our forensics people have a NAS where the failure of one disk, propagated a write error to the second disk, which became unreadable without specialist tools.
One NAS failure out of how many, so we rule out using raid1 because someone in a lab was able to break the second disk by creating a (probably highly unlikely) scenario?
My backup is an exact copy, so if the main drive failed I’d just need to use the backup instead. Ten minutes or less. For me, spending £100 on something that is extremely unlikely and would only take a few minutes to fix is poor value. For a business, it’s still good value.
no, no, no it came to us from a client. I agree it is not a common occurrence, but it wasn’t the first such occurrence they had heard of.
SATA drives have a mean life to failure of about 5 years, that is the standard they are built to. The more you use it the more likely failure, which is why NAS boxes have software to stop the spinning disks when not in use (like laptops etc…).
I have a 4 drive NAS (8TB) and over the last 10 years have had two drives fail in two NAS boxes, I use RAID as I use it for more than music.
The high quality 15K SATA drives I use at work for the SANs fail about 2 per year across about 160 drives. the drives / boxes get replaced every 5 years. These are much higher quality drives than the cheap crap you get in NAS boxes, and they are about 10 times the price, but they get hammered.
The cheap drives you get in laptops we have about 5 - 10 fail a year across an estate of 900, no laptop older than 4 years.
The OP asked about backup, RAID is exactly the right thing.
Without redundancy and resilience it is just copy, not backup.