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tallengnr

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  1. Mark Powell wrote: "If you want safety, don't use any sort of RAID...Personally I play the music from a large internal drive. I have two external drives. One is a Seagate GoFlex Home NAS which has one disk...The disks drives are interchangeable between their different bases. These disks are totally independent, there is no 'mirroring' or anything else...Once I have filled at folder with a few CDs or downloads I power on the two external drives and copy/paste the folder to both of them" From your brief description, you are using a form of manual RAID, by manually copying the data to another drive you're using RAID level 1 or mirroring (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels). If you analyze all the potential risks, your setup has as many risks of catastrophic failure as a dedicated RAID box configured at level 1 (although one setup risks may be different than another, the general number and severity of the risks are equivalent)...hence the need for off-site backups and testing those backups to minimize the risk of data loss. After managing operations in several high-availaility data centers, I can say that all drives will fail, even though data center drives are usually of higher cost, quality and reliability than consumer "Best Buy" drives. With thousands of drives spinning in well managed, high quality, temperature controlled, air purified, cool environment, drive failures are a normal daily occurrence. They are partly analog and mechanical devices with amazingly tight tolerances. As a general rule, I have found that hard drive and RAID longevity is best obtained by: 1) Avoiding software RAID, use only reputable hardware RAID 2) When new, powering drives up and exercising the read/write across the drive for a several days before putting them into production. Probability calculations state that a brand new drives will fail at a higher rates than an older existing drives. 3) Keeping production drives constantly spinning, warm (consistent operating temperature), with little to no downtime. 4) I am careful before applying any upgrades, ESPECIALLY to the NAS operating system...letting other customers check the software before I apply the latest and greatest. 5) I check my NAS weekly (it's on my calendar) for any issues in it's logs. 6) Any RAID drive issues arise, replace the drive immediately, you're on borrowed time for a second drive failure. I have a cold spare ready to install. RAID hardware is generally considered a good way to protect important data, AS LONG AS you regularly watch your drives and RAID sets (i.e. check logs to see if there are any hints of failure), have a good backup procedure and test the recovery of those backups regularly. RAID technology is generally not applied to gain increases in performance and does not guarantee drives will not fail, it only attempts to minimize the risk of data loss by assuming drives (inexpensive or not) WILL fail, but hopefully not all of them at once. I have a Synology, RAID 5 configured NAS with four drives and one cold spare (that has also gone through the days-long read/write tests). I check my NAS logs weekly and I have a daily off-site backups of my data through a major reputable backup company which sends me regular reports of my backups. I also have attached to the NAS USB port a local cheap drive that the NAS runs a scheduled backup to on a weekly basis. I manually test each of the backups on a monthly basis by recovering a file/folder at random. Doing all of this I hope to minimize any risk of loss data (not necessarily minimizing loss of hardware). My storage setup is definitely not cheap, but I feel it is the most critical in my music environment. I can replace a Mac-mini or a speaker in a heartbeat (after opening my checkbook)...the time and expense of replacing all my music? Not fun.
  2. I have been putting together a system myself and I have a new Mac-Mini with a Synology DS411J NAS. I have them hard-wired and connected via a cheap gigabit switch. In fact all the computers in the house access the NAS through this switch and then the switch is connected to my DSL router. Performance has been excellent to/from the NAS, no slowness at all. I experimented with turning on Jumbo packets on the ethernet interfaces, but noticed some stability issues on the network so I went back to normal packets. Nearly all the available services on the NAS have been turned off except for file sharing.
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