External Raid Recommendation

[mikes8500]

Anyone have a recommendation for a good external raid 5 solution?

 

Mike

[Jeff Mottle]

Yup hands down Synology http://www.synology.com Very good support and solid products. I have about $5K worth of their stuff for my own backups and network storage.

[Ernest Burden III]

I used to use Buffalo TeraStation but can no longer recommend them. They became unstable and at a point were unrecoverable by Buffalo. Their tech support threw up their hands after I had tried everything twice (including buying an identical device off eBay to swap the drives into) The drives were Linux formatted, so in the end recovering from my backups (necessary because the device failed while I was shuffling files between several drives to produce a second backup) required attaching all four volumes to my PC and buying a program that could then re-build the RAID. Thank you to Boxx for making a machine pre-wired for six or more SATA drives.

 

Lesson -- any storage can fail, you need TWO backups at any time, at least one in a format that can be read by other devices.

[Jeff Mottle]

Lesson -- any storage can fail, you need TWO backups at any time, at least one in a format that can be read by other devices.

 

Yup, I've lost data for only having one fault tolerant RAID backup too. My network now has 3 Synology devices.

 

1) 5 Drive RAID 5 Main Network storage Array

2) 2 Drive RAID 0 Backup (Onsite)

3) 2 Drive RAID 0 Backup (Offsite)

 

Synology has a very nice OS and you can automatically backup one device to the other. So I have the two backup arrays set to the same static IP (As they are never on the network at the same time) and all I have to do it plug it into the network and it automatically syncs with the main storage array. Weekly I swap the RAID 0 backups to a bank safety deposit box so there is always an offsite copy of all my data. So at the very least my data is in 3 places at all times, sometimes 4.

Edited August 5, 2012 by Jeff Mottle