RAID vs Back Up

[BWLover]

Hello everyone. My current back up solution is I have Code 42's Crashplan software running in in real time backing up to their servers and a desktop hard drive of my own. Right now I am in the market for more hard drive space, and I am looking at Western Digital's options. My main question here is whether RAID 1 is better than my current set up of Crashplan backing up to an external drive. So which is the better solution?

A: Buying two 8TB WD My book desktop hard drives and having Crashplan back up in real time to one of those drives

or

B: Buying one 16TB WD My Book Duo running Raid 1 giving me 8TB of storage and using Crashplan only for offsite/cloud back up?

[aud19]

Do both (or all three). Raid + local + cloud

Also:

http://www.amazon.com/HGST-Deskstar-3-5-Inch-Internal-0S03839/dp/B00O0M5QK8/ref=sr_1_3?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1462560005&sr=1-3&keywords=hitachi+deskstar+nas

[BWLover]

Thanks. Is that hard drive more reliable than WD Red drives?


Bowers & Wilkins 683S1 Speaker's
Rotel RB-1090 2 Channel Amp
Rotel RC-1082 Stereo Pre Amp
Rotel RCD-1072 CD Player
Pro-Ject Debut Carbon w/ Ortofon 2M Red (sitting on a piece of slate supported by 3 "solid tech feet of silence" isolation feet)
Rotel RLC-1040 Power Conditioner
Shynyata Research SR-Z1 Power Outlet & Venom 3 Power Cords x 4
Tara Labs RSC Vector 1 Speaker Cables & Interconnects
Primacoustic Room Treatments

[Alaric]

Thanks. Is that hard drive more reliable than WD Red drives?

The HGST (formerly Hitachi) drives have a very well deserved reputation for reliability. Good, long lasting drives. WD Reds are good HDDs, but over the last few years there have been some hiccups. Given the choice, I would go with the HGST.

[aud19]

I would also suggest just building a NAS but that's another step, not sure if you'd be interested in going that far.

[BWLover]

I would also suggest just building a NAS but that's another step, not sure if you'd be interested in going that far.

I was thinking of going the NAS route but changed my mind. The reason why is I don't have traditional TV in my house, I use Plex Media Server. It's currently running on a Lenovo W Series laptop with an i7 3.1 GHz processor and 16 GB of ram. So I can have multiple HD streams going at once and it doesn't break a sweat. If I were to switch over to a NAS drive for plex I would need a very powerful one, which would be double the cost at least of a RAID set up. And also my laptop is always on as it is it for Crashplan purposes (our phones sync photos and videos thru iCloud to the laptop and they are back up as soon as they hit the hard drive.

[BWLover]

The HGST (formerly Hitachi) drives have a very well deserved reputation for reliability. Good, long lasting drives. WD Reds are good HDDs, but over the last few years there have been some hiccups. Given the choice, I would go with the HGST.

I read that HGST was bought out by Western Digital

[Alaric]

I read that HGST was bought out by Western Digital

They were, but to the best of my knowledge they are made in the original factories, etc.. WD didn't just buy the name to use on their products. That's as far as I know at present. As in anything, research, research, and more research. LOL. You seem to have that last part down pretty well. :T

[aud19]

I was thinking of going the NAS route but changed my mind. The reason why is I don't have traditional TV in my house, I use Plex Media Server. It's currently running on a Lenovo W Series laptop with an i7 3.1 GHz processor and 16 GB of ram. So I can have multiple HD streams going at once and it doesn't break a sweat. If I were to switch over to a NAS drive for plex I would need a very powerful one, which would be double the cost at least of a RAID set up. And also my laptop is always on as it is it for Crashplan purposes (our phones sync photos and videos thru iCloud to the laptop and they are back up as soon as they hit the hard drive.

So basically, you're already running your laptop as a NAS :lol:

Wait... where are you putting all these hard drives...?

[BWLover]

So basically, you're already running your laptop as a NAS :lol:

Wait... where are you putting all these hard drives...?

Hahaha ya pretty much. That's why I don't see a NAS working for me (or having any point) as the laptop will still be on, running Plex and Crashplan.

I've got 7 hard drives running right now, and I hate it.

1: 120GB SSD for the OS
2: 1TB in a hard drive caddy where the cd rom goes in the laptop. Pictures, documents, etc
3: 1TB tv/movies
4: 1TB tv/movies
5: 500GB tv/movies
6: 500GB personal videos/pictures me and the wife made
7: 1TB crashplan back up drive

So ya I'm really ready for ONE massive hard drive lol

[aud19]

Hahaha ya pretty much. That's why I don't see a NAS working for me (or having any point) as the laptop will still be on, running Plex and Crashplan.

I've got 7 hard drives running right now, and I hate it.

1: 120GB SSD for the OS
2: 1TB in a hard drive caddy where the cd rom goes in the laptop. Pictures, documents, etc
3: 1TB tv/movies
4: 1TB tv/movies
5: 500GB tv/movies
6: 500GB personal videos/pictures me and the wife made
7: 1TB crashplan back up drive

So ya I'm really ready for ONE massive hard drive lol

Well you could put Plex and Crashplan on your NAS, that's what I'm using on mine

You just have those all connected via USB or something?

[BWLover]

Well you could put Plex and Crashplan on your NAS, that's what I'm using on mine

You just have those all connected via USB or something?

How many streams can you run at once? I was unaware you could put programs on NAS, that's pretty cool.

5/7 hard drives are USB.

[BWLover]

So how do you control the software (crashplan and plex) on the NAS? I'm assuming with a computer, but is there software one uses to control the software on the NAS?


Bowers & Wilkins 683S1 Speaker's
Rotel RB-1090 2 Channel Amp
Rotel RC-1082 Stereo Pre Amp
Rotel RCD-1072 CD Player
Pro-Ject Debut Carbon w/ Ortofon 2M Red (sitting on a piece of slate supported by 3 "solid tech feet of silence" isolation feet)
Rotel RLC-1040 Power Conditioner
Shynyata Research SR-Z1 Power Outlet & Venom 3 Power Cords x 4
Tara Labs RSC Vector 1 Speaker Cables & Interconnects
Primacoustic Room Treatments

[aud19]

I'm running an unRAID NAS. You monitor/interface the NAS OS, and Crashplan, Plex etc via web page GUI on a computer. I can then watch/listen to media either via Plex on the PC or via a Roku2 box (with Plex player installed). Crashplan I have set to back up to an external USB 3.0 drive connected to the NAS.

Another nice thing about unRAID is that you could expand your NAS with some of your existing drives if you wish and/or use one as 'cache' drive etc as unRAID doesn't require same sized drives. So you could use some of those 1TB drives to expand the array, a 500GB drive (or a SSD as they're faster) for the caxhe drive etc.

Ewwwww on the USB drives :lol:

How many streams will depend on how how much/any transcoding you're doing, what processor is in the NAS etc. If I recall I can do two 1080p streams comfortably or three 720p with my Intel Core i3-4150 Haswell Dual-Core 3.5GHz LGA 1150 54W Desktop Processor. Thread's on my NAS is here if you're interested:

http://www.htguide.com/forum/showthread.php?39535-Thinking-of-DIY-NAS-HELP!/page3

[aud19]

http://cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php

The general rule of thumb is a PASS score of 2000 per 1080p stream (1500/720p).

[BWLover]

I'm running an unRAID NAS. You monitor/interface the NAS OS, and Crashplan, Plex etc via web page GUI on a computer. I can then watch/listen to media either via Plex on the PC or via a Roku2 box (with Plex player installed). Crashplan I have set to back up to an external USB 3.0 drive connected to the NAS.

Another nice thing about unRAID is that you could expand your NAS with some of your existing drives if you wish and/or use one as 'cache' drive etc as unRAID doesn't require same sized drives. So you could use some of those 1TB drives to expand the array, a 500GB drive (or a SSD as they're faster) for the caxhe drive etc.

Ewwwww on the USB drives :lol:

How many streams will depend on how how much/any transcoding you're doing, what processor is in the NAS etc. If I recall I can do two 1080p streams comfortably or three 720p with my Intel Core i3-4150 Haswell Dual-Core 3.5GHz LGA 1150 54W Desktop Processor. Thread's on my NAS is here if you're interested:

http://www.htguide.com/forum/showthr...AS-HELP!/page3

That seems like a pretty sweet set up. Another reason I (at the time) ditched the NAS idea was because I read that crashplan can't back up network drives to their servers. But if crashplan is running ON the NAS that's a different story (obviously)

Is the NAS faster when you give it it's own drive for caching? And ya SSD's are stupid fast compared to HDD's, I couldn't believe the difference it made in my thinkpad

Is that CPU in your NAS?

[BWLover]

http://cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php

The general rule of thumb is a PASS score of 2000 per 1080p stream (1500/720p).

Good to finally know something that easily tells you how well plex will run on your NAS.

[aud19]

That seems like a pretty sweet set up. Another reason I (at the time) ditched the NAS idea was because I read that crashplan can't back up network drives to their servers. But if crashplan is running ON the NAS that's a different story (obviously)

Is the NAS faster when you give it it's own drive for caching? And ya SSD's are stupid fast compared to HDD's, I couldn't believe the difference it made in my thinkpad

Is that CPU in your NAS?

Thanks, I'm quite happy with it so far other than wishing I had more time to tweak it and keep up with ever-improving/evolving stuff available on unRAID. It's pretty amazing what it can do, honestly I'm barely scratching the surface.

Yeah the cache drive operates outside the parity so you can write to it much faster than to the array (especially if it's SSD) vastly increasing your write speed. Then it simply transfers that data to the array at it's leisure.

Yup, that's my NAS CPU

[BWLover]

So did you build your NAS from scratch?


Bowers & Wilkins 683S1 Speaker's
Rotel RB-1090 2 Channel Amp
Rotel RC-1082 Stereo Pre Amp
Rotel RCD-1072 CD Player
Pro-Ject Debut Carbon w/ Ortofon 2M Red (sitting on a piece of slate supported by 3 "solid tech feet of silence" isolation feet)
Rotel RLC-1040 Power Conditioner
Shynyata Research SR-Z1 Power Outlet & Venom 3 Power Cords x 4
Tara Labs RSC Vector 1 Speaker Cables & Interconnects
Primacoustic Room Treatments

[aud19]

So did you build your NAS from scratch?


Bowers & Wilkins 683S1 Speaker's
Rotel RB-1090 2 Channel Amp
Rotel RC-1082 Stereo Pre Amp
Rotel RCD-1072 CD Player
Pro-Ject Debut Carbon w/ Ortofon 2M Red (sitting on a piece of slate supported by 3 "solid tech feet of silence" isolation feet)
Rotel RLC-1040 Power Conditioner
Shynyata Research SR-Z1 Power Outlet & Venom 3 Power Cords x 4
Tara Labs RSC Vector 1 Speaker Cables & Interconnects
Primacoustic Room Treatments

Yeah, I had a QNAP unit I'd been using but decided I wanted more flexibility, more hard drives, better specs and more performance for my $$$.

What I've built (and added to) wouldn't be described as cheap per se but it's definitely more bang for the buck than any of the pre-built units out there. Just have to find a good case (I highly recommend the Lian Li unit in my link), compatible mother board, CPU, RAM etc and some hard drives, pick a NAS OS and set it up.

And overall it's been pretty rock solid and I can't say enough good things about Plex. My wife not only tolerates it but actually ENJOYS using it :T

Like I said, the only 'bad' thing I've seen from unRAID is that the OS and plugins, Dockers etc are all constantly evolving/improving and I just don't have the time to keep up with it. Thankfully the user community is quite helpful. The downside being that every time I go to updates hardware/software there's almost always a new and improved way of doing things, hence a new learning curve. Positive of that is that every time I changed something, it's been a legitimately improved process.

Prime example is that I recently bought another new HGST 4TB drive and finally had time to start pre-clearing it yesterday and of course the process to do so has changed...thankfully for the better! :lol: