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Which HDD's for backup.

Chris Dees
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p.1 #1 · p.1 #1 · Which HDD's for backup.

I'm not sure if I'm posting this in the right forum, but this seemed like the most obvious one.

My backup HDDs are starting to fill up and it's time for replacement.
My processing is as follows:
This year's photos are on my MBP.
All my photos are on 2 4Tb SSDs that are in raid0 (approx. 5Tb).
Every time I've done some editing I make a backup to the SSDs. About 1x per month I make a backup to 1 of the 2 6Tb HDDs. 1x per 3 months I also make a backup to the other HDD.
The backups are made with FolderSynchronise.
All external drives are only turned on when I need them.

This is also the time to see if my backup "strategy" is still adequate (including the software).

At the moment there are only 3 manufacturers of HDDs, but they have so many different versions that I've lost track.
I'm thinking of 10/12Tb HDD's

Sep 07, 2024 at 04:42 AM

schlotz
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p.1 #2 · p.1 #2 · Which HDD's for backup.

While the 10/12Tb drives will provide space relief, they too will eventually fill up. Granted the Raid-0 of 2 4Tb SSDs no doubt provides a perky access experience but it also is playing Russian Roulette with your backed up photos. However, since all of current year photos are on your MBP that might not be a major risk. Definitely your call on that. Took a look at the software. It seems very capable and provides a number of options. One just needs to make sure the options used are well thought through in order to achieve a comprehensive solution.

Similarly, I went through this process of upgrading HDD's for a while but at some point decided to go in a different direction that didn't require dealing with a number of drives, turning them on etc. Fast forward, today all of my photos are backed up to my NAS (w/thunderbolt access) and to a 2nd Raid-5 DAS. This includes current year photos which also reside on my MBP. The NAS was configured with 8Tb drives using 5 bays out of 6 so there is still room for expansion within it and there is an add on unit that can be purchased it I ever need even more space. So far the NAS is barely 50% utilized and that includes housing and serving up an extensive movie collection. I use Carbon Copy to do all the work and its programed to run after midnight. Also, I maintain a couple of spare drives on the self to cover potential failures in either the NAS or DAS.

Your easiest solution certainly would be to pick up some larger HHDs. This provides space and time to continue your current backup strategy. Unless I missed it, I don't see where your current process provides for a daily backup of what's on your MBP.

Sep 07, 2024 at 08:10 AM

js47
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p.1 #3 · p.1 #3 · Which HDD's for backup.

Since you have 5TB of data on 4TB and 6TB drives you are right that this is a great time to consider your backup strategy. Your data is not as safe as it could be with your current method.

First — you really must stop using RAID0. In RAID0, if you lose one drive you lose ALL of the data on BOTH drives. Not safe at all. [RAID0 is only useful when you need the additional speed of being able to read from both drives simultaneously, but for backups that is not necessary. Plus they are SSDs so you'd be maxing out the bus speed with a single drive or RAID1 anyway.]

What I would do in your situation is buy a 4-bay NAS from Synology and put your current 2x 6TB hard drives into it. Then add 1 or 2 more HDDs. Use the NAS in the place of your current 4TB SSDs. [Note that I am recommending Synology because they are the only company that offers “Synology Hybrid Raid” (SHR), which lets you mix HDD capacities without penalty — with any other brand you’d need to use standard RAID and all hard drives would be treated as having the capacity of the smallest hard drive.]

Then I would buy 2 big external hard drives (12TB+) to use in the place of your current 6TB HDDs. I’d make a full backup of all the NAS data onto one of them each month. Keep one in your house and keep the other offsite at your office or a friend’s house, and rotate them monthly — that way each drive will have data no more than 2 months old at any time. Keeping one at an offsite location protects your data in the case of fire/flood/burglary/etc. [If you wait for a Black Friday deal you can find 18TB for $200 each. 18TB is bigger than you'd need but that's the same price as you'd normally pay for 10TB, and the HDD quality is higher in the high capacity units.]

Sep 07, 2024 at 08:50 AM

Chris Dees
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p.1 #4 · p.1 #4 · Which HDD's for backup.

Matt, Jake thanks for your input.

I back up my MBP with Time-Machine (without the photos). All my documents (a few Gb's) are in the cloud.

I know the dangers of Raid0, but I think I am sufficiently covered with my backups and the recent photos on the MBP (old stubborn man

). The current HDDs are an old Toshiba and an even older LaCie; time to replace.

I don't see the point of a NAS in my situation. I don't need to see the photos outside. Maybe a Raid1 with 2 HDDs and a 3rd HDD for outside the house.
Suppose I take photos for another 10/12 years (then I'll be 80), then I should be able to get by with 12Tb of space, a little more is never a bad thing. I can wait until Black-Friday.

Anyway, what brand/type would I buy best. NAS drives seem a bit overkill to me.

Sep 07, 2024 at 01:50 PM

EB-1
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p.1 #5 · p.1 #5 · Which HDD's for backup.

The standard in capacity is 24TB at this point. I would not be going under 12TB if you want Helium drives, which run cooler, use significantly less power, and have fewer operating environment concerns. The WD Datacenter (DC HC5xx series) drives or the Seagate EXOS drives are designed for 24x7, 5 year operation and used in volume by the big storage centers. I have four 8-bay arrays and some larger and smaller also. The WD drives are a little more expensive, but quieter than the last few years of EXOS. Eight EXOS are quite annoying in close proximity.

There are retail drives like the IronWolves Pro or the WD Red Pro, but they cost more in the states than the datacenter type drives. There are also the WD golds, which appear to be exactly the same as the DC drives but retail packaging. Avoid the cheaper WD/Seagate NAS drives, some of which are afflicted with the shingles or at least lower transfer rates. Supposedly the NAS drive FW is more tuned to small file use (like you would have a bunch of low users in an office or similar), but photo files are large so I would not expect much differences. The Seagate and IIRC WD warranties here mostly useless after one failure, but I think it's better in the EU. Toshiba drives are not so common here and have fewer models so I have no direct experience with them.

EBH

Sep 07, 2024 at 02:08 PM

skid00skid00
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p.1 #6 · p.1 #6 · Which HDD's for backup.

I'm backing up to single, 2/3/4TB bare drives.

The 4TB drives are terribly slow as they fill up during a backup. IE-3TB of data written to a freshly formated 4TB drive. The first 1/3 data will write at 1.4-1.6 MB per second. At the end of the backup, I'm down to 0.7 MB/s or less. It can take almost 4 hours.

I'm using a USB connected two-bay dock.

I'm guessing most of you use more pro backup strategies...

Sep 08, 2024 at 05:05 PM

EB-1
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p.1 #7 · p.1 #7 · Which HDD's for backup.

Chris Dees wrote:
I don't see the point of a NAS in my situation. I don't need to see the photos outside. Maybe a Raid1 with 2 HDDs and a 3rd HDD for outside the house.
Suppose I take photos for another 10/12 years (then I'll be 80), then I should be able to get by with 12Tb of space, a little more is never a bad thing. I can wait until Black-Friday.

Anyway, what brand/type would I buy best. NAS drives seem a bit overkill to me.

I posted in parallel without reading this. I never connect a production NAS with all my files to an external network. I have a physically isolated separate slower network to the internet, etc.

I usually don't buy NAS drives either as the enterprise drive like EXOS are usually cheaper here. There really are not very many choices in loose 3.5" drives anymore since the vast majority are in datacenters or small offices, with a few enthusiasts buying them. The "consumer" 3.5" drives are mostly low in capacity, run on air not He, are slow, and are less reliable and durable. Many of the cheaper HDDs have Shingles and it may be difficult to determine without doing some research. Shingles (SMR) are not good since the sustained writes plummet after the convential (CMR) buffer is filled. You want CMR drives for sustained writes.

EBH

Sep 08, 2024 at 11:54 PM

Chris Dees
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p.1 #8 · p.1 #8 · Which HDD's for backup.

EB-1 wrote:
………..
Many of the cheaper HDDs have Shingles and it may be difficult to determine without doing some research. Shingles (SMR) are not good since the sustained writes plummet after the convential (CMR) buffer is filled. You want CMR drives for sustained writes.

EBH

I read about the shingles and the mess WD made trying to hide it

Sep 09, 2024 at 02:05 AM

js47
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p.1 #9 · p.1 #9 · Which HDD's for backup.

As with EBH, the vast majority of NAS owners never access their NAS from the internet and rather connect exclusively over the local network. It is a totally valid use case and is what I did for years. Personally I backup from my home NAS to another NAS that is off site, and I also use my home NAS to back up my cloud drives, but that is the only time I use it over the internet. Everything is automated and I don’t need to think about anything anymore after setting it up so I love it and my data is safe.

Locally, my home NAS gets time machine backups as well as photo backups. I have a folder on my desktop with “production” photo and video that automatically syncs with my home NAS. When editing/exporting are done, the photos get moved from my MBP internal storage to the catalog on my NAS. It’s possible to edit directly off the NAS, but it is slow.

My offsite NAS was my primary home NAS for 12 years. I ran out of space on the two 4TB drives I had in it (RAID1 with 4TB of usable space) so instead of upgrading the drives I bought a 5-bay NAS after finding a deal and put the two old 4TB drives in that along with a new 10TB drive (SHR with 8TB of usable space). Instead of selling my old NAS for $20 I popped in two 14TB drives in RAID1 and use it for remote backups. [I’ve since populated the rest of my 5-bay NAS with another 10TB and a 12TB, which gives me 12TB of usable space in SHR-2, and if I replace one of the 4TB drives that increases to 24TB of usable space with 2-drive failure tolerance — way more TB than I need, but these were the drives I found the best deals on. Note that it is totally valid to leave bays empty and then just add another drive any time you run low on space!]

There are few people with a “need” for NAS/enterprise drives, but there is not really a downside to them. In my case, they are what I found the best deals on so that is what I have. They have great performance and theoretically excellent warranties.

Sep 09, 2024 at 04:23 AM

js47
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p.1 #10 · p.1 #10 · Which HDD's for backup.

skid00skid00 wrote:
I'm backing up to single, 2/3/4TB bare drives.

The 4TB drives are terribly slow as they fill up during a backup. IE-3TB of data written to a freshly formated 4TB drive. The first 1/3 data will write at 1.4-1.6 MB per second. At the end of the backup, I'm down to 0.7 MB/s or less. It can take almost 4 hours.

I'm using a USB connected two-bay dock.

That is really awful performance, it would drive me crazy. Are they SMR drives?

For comparison, my sustained write speeds to my NAS are nearly 100 MB/s — over WiFi! And 2 MB/s backing up my local NAS to my offsite NAS, which isn't even located on the same continent let alone connected by a 6 inch cable....

Sep 09, 2024 at 04:27 AM

Chris Dees
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p.1 #11 · p.1 #11 · Which HDD's for backup.

I would only connect a NAS directly to my MBP dock (just a DAS) and only turn it on when I need it. This seems like an expensive solution to me. A NAS easily costs €400,- and then I still have to fill it up with disks. In addition, something has to be done to make a backup of the NAS.
I have all my photos on an 8Tb Raid0 SSD that is connected to the MBP and is turned on when I need them.

For now I am thinking of the following:
2x 12/14Tb disks in a Raid1 setup (Acasis has one). For backing up the SSDs
1x 12/14Tb hard drive for off-site backup (Seagate Expansion Desktop or something).

Sep 09, 2024 at 08:05 AM

js47
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p.1 #12 · p.1 #12 · Which HDD's for backup.

Chris Dees wrote:
I would only connect a NAS directly to my MBP dock (just a DAS) and only turn it on when I need it. This seems like an expensive solution to me. A NAS easily costs €400,- and then I still have to fill it up with disks. In addition, something has to be done to make a backup of the NAS.
I have all my photos on an 8Tb Raid0 SSD that is connected to the MBP and is turned on when I need them.

For now I am thinking of the following:
2x 12/14Tb disks in a Raid1 setup (Acasis has...Show more →

I would still at least change the RAID0 to JBOD, but otherwise this is a solid plan Chris. (Note I don't know anything about Acasis). Last Black Friday the 18TB WD Easystore was on sale for $200 — you can monitor WD external HDD prices here (Seagate usually has similar deals at similar times): https://shucks.top/

Pre-owned NAS units could be something to consider as well. If you get a 4-bay NAS and populate it with two 4/6TB drives plus your two current 6TB drives you can save a lot of money on drives versus buying two new 12/14TB drives, and you will still have 12/14TB of usable space. So overall enclosure+drives could work out similarly, but you have a lot more functionality built into a NAS if you choose to use it down the road. To backup the NAS all you have to do is plug the external HDD into its USB port, same as backing up from the Acasis I presume.

Sep 09, 2024 at 08:45 AM

Bruce n Philly
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p.1 #13 · p.1 #13 · Which HDD's for backup.

I use 2 NASs with four drives each... found it was cheaper to add a NAS than upgrade disks... I purchased a used, matching NAS from ebay, and then populated with new drives. My NASs are not exposed to the internet. I have the NASs spin down after one hour of non use to preserve disk life.

Then I backup the NASs to other single drives I connect up when I do my big backups about once a month. I have triple backup redundancy not counting the working drive in my workstation.

I use FreeFileSync... I can pretty much just click and go. The backup times are not fast at all but I don't care as I run them overnight.

Regarding the use of RAID 0... I use RAID 0 in my main workstation mainly so I can string together a few lower-capacity SSDs which turn them all into one big drive. I am not worried about failure as SDDs are incredibly reliable. I have no issues using RAID 0 with SSDs whereas I would not use RAID 0 with spinning drives. These configurations are two totally different animals regarding risk. BTW, I never had a SSD fail... spinners have and will fail.

Peace
Bruce in Philly

Sep 09, 2024 at 11:10 AM

js47
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p.1 #14 · p.1 #14 · Which HDD's for backup.

Bruce n Philly wrote:
I use 2 NASs with four drives each... found it was cheaper to add a NAS than upgrade disks... I purchased a used, matching NAS from ebay, and then populated with new drives. My NASs are not exposed to the internet. I have the NASs spin down after one hour of non use to preserve disk life.

Then I backup the NASs to other single drives I connect up when I do my big backups about once a month. I have triple backup redundancy not counting the working drive in my workstation.

I use FreeFileSync... I can pretty much just...Show more →

But why use RAID0 instead of JBOD? Especially with SSDs you are doubling your risk while getting the same capacity and the same read/write speed. With HDDs at least you get improved performance — still not worth it though.

Edit:
- If you have two 4TB drives in RAID0, you get 8TB of usable space. But if either one of those drives fail, you lose all data on both drives since in RAID0 part of every file is on both drives but no single file is on a single drive. For 2 drives in RAID0 you typically will achieve 2x the read and write speeds of a single drive, but this is largely irrelevant for SSDs.
- If you have two 4TB drives in JBOD, you also get 8TB of usable space. But if either one of those drives fail, you only lose the data that was on the drive that failed.

Sep 09, 2024 at 12:04 PM

Chris Dees
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p.1 #15 · p.1 #15 · Which HDD's for backup.

I’m not afraid of loosing data, I will have 2 backups on HDD’s. So if one SSD fails I have to buy a new one and just copy the data from the HDD’s. That cost time and that’s the only thing I have enough.

With Raid0 I have one drive that I can refer to and need to backup.

I just looked for a 4 bay Synology NAS and it’s even more expensive then I thought.

Sep 09, 2024 at 01:58 PM

Chris Dees
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p.1 #16 · p.1 #16 · Which HDD's for backup.

I think I’m looking for somenting like This
Qnap DAS

Sep 09, 2024 at 03:32 PM

Bruce n Philly
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p.1 #17 · p.1 #17 · Which HDD's for backup.

Chris Dees wrote:
I’m not afraid of loosing data, I will have 2 backups on HDD’s. So if one SSD fails I have to buy a new one and just copy the data from the HDD’s. That cost time and that’s the only thing I have enough.

With Raid0 I have one drive that I can refer to and need to backup.

I just looked for a 4 bay Synology NAS and it’s even more expensive then I thought.

A 4 bay Synology is really a great thing... If you have the inclination, they are showing up on ebay. You are looking for just a chassis then populate with your own, new drives.

Peace
Bruce in Philly

Sep 09, 2024 at 03:43 PM

Bruce n Philly
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p.1 #18 · p.1 #18 · Which HDD's for backup.

js47 wrote:
But why use RAID0 instead of JBOD? Especially with SSDs you are doubling your risk while getting the same capacity and the same read/write speed. With HDDs at least you get improved performance — still not worth it though.

Edit:
- If you have two 4TB drives in RAID0, you get 8TB of usable space. But if either one of those drives fail, you lose all data on both drives since in RAID0 part of every file is on both drives but no single file is on a single drive. For 2 drives in RAID0 you typically will achieve 2x the read...Show more →

Coupla things...

First, let's keep to internal storage in a PC. JBOD, aka just a bunch of disks, are just single disks with their own drive letters. Nothing wrong with this, but I had a small stack of SSDs sitting around of 1 gig each. If you have the available SATA ports available on your mother board, I think it is really convenient to configure them as one RAID 0 disk as you have only one drive letter and a slight increase in performance. I use this as a kind of a scratch drive for storing photos right off of my cards and then cull them from there... when done, I move them to my D drive, run a backup, and edit from there. I also have a few folders of static files on this RAID array. Given that I back up my system regularly, I am not worried if this RAID 0 craps out. The static folders can be recovered from my NAS and the photos, while very inconvenient, can be re-read from my camera cards (or from my NAS if I ran the backups). I never delete my photos on my camera cards until I head out the next time thus having a temporary backup if needed. BTW, I never needed it and my SSDs have never failed. I feel the increased risk of RAID 0 with SSDs is negligible.

On my NASs I use spinners (HDDs) configured as RAID 5 (or the NAS vendor's equivalent) for everything and just have the entire NAS as a single volume... to keep this real simple. RAID 5 will tolerate a single disk failure with not data loss. The cost to this is a hit on performance and available disk space as some is used for redundancy smeared across the four drives. I have experienced hard drive failure in my NASs a few times now... I have been using them for many many years now. Spinners will fail. My NASs allow for hot swaps so away I went. The time it takes to resynce the new drive is long on my older NASs and will take many days... during which the files are available but at reduced performance. Even with my drive failures, I never lost data. Using a NAS in RAID 5 as storage for transactional data such a photo file there for editing is kind of dumb as it is slow... going through a network and then the slower drive system.

My transactional files are always inside my PC using the fastest drives in the fastest ports.

Maybe what is confusing is my drives inside my PC that I use for transactional purposes. My C drive is the operating system and applications like Light Room. My photos library, LR catalog, and the transactional photos (the ones I am editing) are on the D drive. My C and D drives are stupid fast NVME M.2 Gen5 drives, the C is 2TB, and D is 4TB. My E drive is the RAID 0 array. I recently built this screaming machine.

Peace
Bruce in Philly

Edited on Sep 09, 2024 at 04:55 PM · View previous versions

Sep 09, 2024 at 04:03 PM

schlotz
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p.1 #19 · p.1 #19 · Which HDD's for backup.

Chris Dees wrote:
I think I’m looking for somenting like This
Qnap DAS

Yes it will do but remember it's limited to 5Gbs transfer speeds max, which maybe just fine for your use. You'll have to decide.

Sep 09, 2024 at 04:25 PM

Bruce n Philly
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p.1 #20 · p.1 #20 · Which HDD's for backup.

schlotz wrote:
Yes it will do but remember it's limited to 5Gbs transfer speeds max, which maybe just fine for your use. You'll have to decide.

Yes. In general, you will experience the fastest performance with your transactional files, the ones you are editing, the catalog et al, on an internal SSD drive(s).

Peace
Bruce in Philly

Sep 09, 2024 at 04:59 PM

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