External Hard Drive Reliability

P.S. note the “534 sold” LOL. Big ol’ servers way more than anybody usually needs at home, stacked on pallets in warehouses.
 
denverpilot said:
P.S. note the “534 sold” LOL. Big ol’ servers way more than anybody usually needs at home, stacked on pallets in warehouses.
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...and how much will you pay for the power to run that at home?

...how many weeks will you have to listen to your wife complain about the presence of such a beast in her home? ;)
 
denverpilot said:
They usually had multiple GigE ports that were combinable if your switch will do it, and all the hardware is monster tough
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Hold on, there are people who don't run 10G at home?

Ok, it was a bit funny when the Charter Cable guy came to install the Internet connection and I opened the door to the closet rack.
 
dans2992 said:
...and how much will you pay for the power to run that at home?

...how many weeks will you have to listen to your wife complain about the presence of such a beast in her home? ;)
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Stick it out in the garage. LOL.

Actually if you set the fans to quiet mode they’re okay — in a closet. Ha.

But if they reboot the fans to to maximum to test them for about twenty seconds and it just sounds like a Blue Angels sneak pass for a little bit. Ha.
 
denverpilot said:
Stick it out in the garage. LOL.

Actually if you set the fans to quiet mode they’re okay — in a closet. Ha.

But if they reboot the fans to to maximum to test them for about twenty seconds and it just sounds like a Blue Angels sneak pass for a little bit. Ha.
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They are impressive on boot! Electricity wise, they're not bad unless you're really pushing them (which would also make the fans crank!). It's amazing to me the hardware bang for the buck you can get from used sever chassis.
 
I have 4 blade servers sitting in my garage. Way to loud and hot. Want one?
 
Salty said:
Here's the problem I have with any array at home (and it's why I'm stoked about boxcryptor). Even if you use mirroring, or raid 6, or whatever, most of the consumer SAN devices are very proprietary even between versions and firmware versions. I've lost a RAID controller once, and lost all my data because I couldn't find one anywhere that would work with my disks.... That was a hard lesson learned. Oh, and the other problem was mentioned above, if your house burns down or is robbed, you're SOL.
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zfs baby! Been using it since it's inception. It was scary in the early days but extremely promising. Today it's just down right awesome!
 
Salty said:
If you have lots of money, don't care who sees your data (depending on the solution), don't mind if it just isn't there anymore, or you can't get to it because of legal/ financial random reasons they decide to lock you out, and don't need fast access....
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The great bulk of the data on most computers is stuff that isn't sensitive and wouldn't be worth stealing. The remainder that is or may be sensitive should be encrypted locally, anyway. Pretty much any commercial data center is more secure than my home office. Just because something resides locally doesn't mean it can be stored unencrypted.

In addition, any decent imaging software offers the option to encrypt and password-protect the images, providing a second layer of protection. Uploading those images to the cloud as a secondary or tertiary backup solution given a secure imaging configuration places your data at no more risk than it was in your home office.

That being said, I never advocate using cloud backup as the sole backup solution. I use it for both encrypted archives and for non-sensitive stuff like software downloads, almost all of which could be re-downloaded from the publishers' sites. Stashing them in one place just makes it easier to recover all of them if I ever need to. Anything personal that winds up on Backblaze B2 and/or Amazon S3 has already been encrypted locally at least once before it gets uploaded.

Rich
 
denverpilot said:
I’ll also throw out there if money is no object, get a five drive Synology, set it up to auto backup to S3 or Glacier with a couple of clicks, and replace drives whenever they fail and never worry about it again. LOL.

I’m still too cheap but our monster Synology at work is a total workhorse and does an amazing amount of things one could play with at home that we don’t use at the office. All sorts of things that a Linux admin can set up but would take a few hours is done in a mouse click, and relatively sanely too.
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I have a Synology on my home network and highly endorse it. It's a perfect mini server with a good number of apps for file and photo sharing. It's pretty user friendly and takes most of the headache out of maintaining a multi-hard drive (RAID) system. I only use it with two bays, so simple redundancy, and have had two disks fail over the years. Each time, it's been a matter of hearing the alarm tone (or getting an email from the device, very configurable) that a drive has failed, opening the case and swapping out the failed drive with a replacement, and then logging back in and letting it repair the array.

For added safety, I have critical files and folders scheduled for realtime cloud backup, also setup easily with the synology web based admin screen.
 
JakeHall said:
I have a Synology on my home network and highly endorse it. It's a perfect mini server with a good number of apps for file and photo sharing. It's pretty user friendly and takes most of the headache out of maintaining a multi-hard drive (RAID) system. I only use it with two bays, so simple redundancy, and have had two disks fail over the years. Each time, it's been a matter of hearing the alarm tone (or getting an email from the device, very configurable) that a drive has failed, opening the case and swapping out the failed drive with a replacement, and then logging back in and letting it repair the array.

For added safety, I have critical files and folders scheduled for realtime cloud backup, also setup easily with the synology web based admin screen.
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Do you use Synology's cloud backup service? I've been thinking of getting one at home and then having it back up some things to the cloud.
 
flyingcheesehead said:
Do you use Synology's cloud backup service? I've been thinking of getting one at home and then having it back up some things to the cloud.
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We’re using Amazon S3. Built in app and super cheap. Can go cheaper with Glacier but the built in app years ago couldn’t restore individual files, which meant if the NAS was close to full or badly partitioned you’d have a problem unless you restored entire shares.

S3, you can log in yourself to the share and grab whatever files you like and put them back on the NAS or whatever. Even works when the NAS isn’t accessible.

Can also be encrypted as I recall. Both types.

There’s also a ton of other brand apps for cloud backup in the App Store thingy. Have you looked through yours? Tons of options.

Since we are already an AWS shop, tossing up a backup S3 bucket for the Synology was a no brainer. The app has been around and stable for a lot of years.
 
flyingcheesehead said:
Do you use Synology's cloud backup service? I've been thinking of getting one at home and then having it back up some things to the cloud.
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I'm using the MS OneDrive integration with the synology app for cloud backup. I found myself with a spare bunch of space with my Office subscription and enjoy the way it's integrated into office apps and is also supported as virtual folders on my locked down corporate work PCs.
 
I use them. A lot.
But I only turn them on when I need them.
I have 8, 2 on each server, and 2 I attach to my Laptop. They are all 1 tb.
I also have 2 drives that are 140 gig each, salvaged from old laptops. they must be 25 years old by now.
All they have on them is the account numbers/information, userid and password for every account I have ever owned, so they don't need to be very big.
They are on ports next to the two "emergency exits" in the house and easy to grab if something is going horribly wrong and we need to scram.
Everything of importance is shadowed on the Laptop and it's external drives. Just grab it and run as required.

I have only had one drive fail catastrophically since 2010. The lightning strike last year fried 2 of the external drive holders, but the drives survived.
 
Shepherd said:
I also have 2 drives that are 140 gig each, salvaged from old laptops. they must be 25 years old by now.
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Not even close... When I bought a laptop 26 years ago, it had an 80 MEGAbyte drive that was "high end" at the time, at least for a laptop. A few months later, a support tech hooked a monstrous 1-GB hard drive to it and I had to take a screen shot because a GIGAbyte was almost unheard of at the time.
 
flyingcheesehead said:
Not even close... When I bought a laptop 26 years ago, it had an 80 MEGAbyte drive that was "high end" at the time, at least for a laptop. A few months later, a support tech hooked a monstrous 1-GB hard drive to it and I had to take a screen shot because a GIGAbyte was almost unheard of at the time.
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I remember using a PC-AT with an 8-MHz chip, monochrome screen, and not one but two 5-1/4 disk drives and 1024 baud modem. And considered myself king of the hill back then. Even had to walk uphill in the snow, both ways, barefooted to use it.
 
AggieMike88 said:
I remember using a PC-AT with an 8-MHz chip, monochrome screen, and not one but two 5-1/4 disk drives and 1024 baud modem. And considered myself king of the hill back then. Even had to walk uphill in the snow, both ways, barefooted to use it.
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Kids! I started with a Westinghouse 2550 mini and a model 33 teletype. After the Wang of course. Then TRS-80 Model 1. Then Compupro 8080 with 2(!) 8” floppies. Then the IBM PC with 256K memory. THEN the IBM
AT clone...
 
I remember when Apple came out with 10mb and 20mb hard drives for the Mac. In a world of 800k and 1.4mb floppies, that was HUGE. And about $1,200 IIRC. I eventually opted for a 44mb Syquest removable storage drive.

In any case, my Toshiba 2tb drive arrived and successfully did the first backup run of my Mac Mini. Still fascinating how each generation of HD keeps getting slimmer and slimmer and cheaper and cheaper.
 
AggieMike88 said:
I remember using a PC-AT with an 8-MHz chip, monochrome screen, and not one but two 5-1/4 disk drives and 1024 baud modem. And considered myself king of the hill back then. Even had to walk uphill in the snow, both ways, barefooted to use it.
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I still own 2 of those machines and a PS-2 mod 80. (And a working Vic - 20)
They all still run, and my kids love dragging them out and putzing with them when they come visit.
The original "Lunar Lander" still rocks! So does "Snipes".
 
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