Data Hoarder

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We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

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Best storage option for a mini PC? (alien.top)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I use a mini PC (n100 processor) for my home server. I just have a 6tb HDD plugged into it. I’m wondering what the best solution is for me long term. I’ll probably have the HDD filled in about a year.

I see a lot of usb enclosures on Amazon but the idea of running like 5 disks over a single usb makes me nervous.

I also keep seeing the 4 bay qnap DAS that can do raid 5. That’s tempting too to prevent data loss.

I’d like to keep the miniPC as the center since it’s configured just how I like it.

What would you recommend for external storage?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I see a lot of usb enclosures on Amazon but the idea of running like 5 disks over a single usb makes me nervous.

Why does it make you nervous?

I also keep seeing the 4 bay qnap DAS that can do raid 5. That’s tempting too to prevent data loss.

The mantra: RAID is not backup. RAID is for uptime and recovery in hardware failure scenarios. Backup is your protection against data loss, not RAID. If your entire RAID array catches fire, gets struck by lightning, gets caught in a flood- whatever, if it hits the whole thing, it's gone.

What would you recommend for external storage?

Well, you have to answer the "why" question above. There's no universal answer to this question. I myself on Windows, use multiple USB connected JBOD enclosures (16 disks). I use StableBit DrivePool to aggregate disks(on Linux, I'd use something like MergerFS), instead of any kind of RAID. I use a feature DrivePool has to duplicate specified folders across multiple disks for local redundancy to improve recovery time against corruption/hw failure etc to make up for not having RAID, with BackBlaze to perform backups to prevent data loss in disaster scenarios.

It works for me, and I'm fine with any differences in performance I might get- they largely just aren't that impactful most of the time in my use-case. It might not be what you want. You have to consider what things are most important to you to determine what storage setup you want to use.