Alan321
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 p.1 #13 · p.1 #13 · Please help with external storage for home/small business. | |
JBPhotog wrote:
A reasonable and economic approach that also provides back up redundancy is the following.
- External drive bay with a minimum two drives, no RAID, use software to back up, a great one is Carbon Copy Cloner. These are data drives, all files get stored hear, the internal drive is for OS and apps so no need for SSD for data drives. CCC can be set up to do daily backups and of course instant backups once you load your memory cards or finishing the edits on files. Personally, I use an OWC Thunderbay 4, Thunderbolt 2 speeds, 4 drive bays.
- include an external drive bay so you can insert a drive, run CCC pull the drive for off site storage. My choice is the Newertech drive bay.
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+1 on CCC. A really good program, but only for Mac 
I've used the thunderbay 4 too, running Soft RAID at thunderbolt 1 speeds from a 2011 MBP in RAID 4. It was good enough considering that thunderbolt 2 would be at least twice as fast, but when I switched to Windows the speed dropped to all ahead dead slow. Think USB 1.1 speeds ! I've only just got a PC with thunderbolt 2 and was going to resurrect my thunderbay 4 with a RAID 5 setup but that pretty much means using Windows Storage Spaces, which gobbles up CPU cycles far more so than Soft RAID and is still very slow. So now I'm going to try instead a relatively simple RAID 10 without using Windows Storage Spaces.
Unless Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 are inherently much slower than OSX for file transfers, my Windows laptops with thunderbolt 1 have been less than half as fast as my old MBP and so I came to blame it on secretly crippled hardware. e.g. too many computer features sharing the same CPU and M/B data lanes.
I've used a drobo 5D too with dual drive redundancy but it was terribly slow. Worse still, it was very limiting when it came to mixing small volumes with large volumes. The slow speed is consistent with what I have been reading about RAID 5 and RAID 6 but drobo does not actually use standard "RAID" and it takes full control of the volume sizes and locations. So now the drobo is just a storm-rated paper weight (i.e. heavy) or perhaps a small boat anchor.
There's a lot of merit in using multiple single HDDs for backups and managing them manually, but a RAID 10 offers better protection from a single HDD failure between those manual interventions. It is so easy to lose track of time or even forget to do a manual backup that some automation is highly recommended. I decided to leave the manual backups for backing up the backups, and automate the more urgent first backups.
The fundamental downside of any always-avaiable backup is that they'll be zapped, stolen, burned or drowned along with the PC when something goes wrong. I've got far too much stuff to be relying on cloud-based storage and so I just make lots of single-drive backups and store them elsewhere.
A word of warning about relying on backups:
I had a laptop computer die on me; slowly and painfully over a period of many months. Near the end it trashed every drive that I plugged into it, and I had lost two drives of backups to it before I recognised what was happening. One or two backups is simply not enough to be relying on when your fan is really covered in sh...
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Which is why I'm here asking for suggestions on a system that I can use and will not have to be replaced with something larger for awhile... Also I don't want something super expensive if I can avoid it but it needs to be fast enough to handle LR and PS. The other thing I was thinking about adding is an external Samsung 1tb SSD to use for Lightroom editing not sure if it works with Photoshop? I would like to find something in the neighborhood of the $500 range (NOT INCLUDING SSD) and wouldn't mind buying used if it was in good condition. I understand I may be fooling myself since when I look at eBay many are way more expensive but since I really don't know what I'm looking at that may not mean anything. 
I like it cause you don't have to deal with NAS software, it appears as one huge drive that can be increased just by swapping out a drive with a larger capacity one without loosing data. BTW I do have it set for dual disk redundancy protection. 
But now that I've got it running I can't imagine doing without it. My work is backed up without my involvement or intervention. I don't have to think about it, it just happens. And while I could have that same functionality with an online external drive, having the redundancy of RAID is a comfort because I've had an external die quickly and without warning. One day it worked, the next it was unmountable.