Excessive Hard Disks - What Am I to Do with Them All?

airzone on 06/10/2014 - 01:54

I have a dilemma of the first world type…

My wife's PC has 2 x 2tb hard disks, one for media (which I share to our home network using a DLNA server), and one for her games. OS is on an SSD (and I also have another spare SSD in there doing nothing). The media drive is nearly full… And the PC is on nearly 24/7.

I also have a collection of basically unused 2tb hard disks. 3 in total. Plus a few extra smallish 128/256gb SSD's.

So my problem is this… The wife's PC takes a lot of power to run. And it's loud. It's a kick-arse gaming PC (the things we do for our sweethearts). And the media drive is nearly full. And I have a bunch of spare hard disks collecting dust.

So should I:

1) Install another disk in honey's PC, and just use some trickery to merge the disks together (such as simlinks and balance the load, or even a shock horror disk stripe array), and life my life in blissful ignorance of the increasing risk of losing my stuff?

2) Set up a NAS with the 4 x 2tb disks, use raid 10, and map it to the woman's PC as a net share and serve media from that?

3) Set up an energy efficient and quiet media server PC, move the disks to that, and then use something like a software raid 10 to store the media on, and use a spare SSD for the OS disk (and I have both legal Microsoft desktop and server OS's available in any flavour). I would also have this machine operate as a development & SQL server (thus replacing my old core 2 box). The missus would need to turn off her PC at night.. Which she probably wouldn't do.

4) Number 3, except instead of using those 2tb disks, I just so happen to have an iSCSI SAN kicking about with 15 disks installed, thus blowing out the energy efficiency and quietness portion of my goals. Oh, and I'll probably need a few more NICs to make this work effectively :p

Computing

Comments

  • [Deactivated] on 06/10/2014 - 02:40
    +8

    the "woman's" PC is yours, isn't it. And you're single, aren't you.

    • airzone on 06/10/2014 - 10:57

      I wish it was mine.. I have to game on a laptop :(

  • Paul Atreides on 06/10/2014 - 09:27
    +1

    sounds like you spend a lot of time on ozb

  • retiredfeline on 06/10/2014 - 09:31

    You could set up a low power PC for a NAS and get 8TB out of 5x2TB disks in RAID5 with one of the SSDs as the boot drive.

  • pjetson on 06/10/2014 - 09:33

    Choice 2 seems the most reasonable to me. Choice 3 started off as a reasonable option, but then you made it less reasonable by wanting to use it as a PC as well.

    • airzone on 06/10/2014 - 11:01

      The TFS / SQL server component is fire and forget with some occasional remote management. I just wonder if I should set up a NAS box and think about moving the DLNA server (and other stuff) to a nuc later on..

  • Bonsaichop on 06/10/2014 - 12:27
    +1

    I'd go down the NAS route. We have here a 5 bay Synology NAS (DS1010+) that has been in continuos service for the last 4 years.

    I have it set up in two-disk redundancy 'hybrid' mode, which has a 2 drive failure protection and will work with whatever drives of whatever size you put into it to give you the maximum amount of space with failure protection.

    In the time we have had it, it's been expanded to a 10-bay unit with the additional DX-510 module, originally populated with 2TB drives which have been running non-stop for the past 4 years some have started to fail out of their warranty period. No problems, now i'm progressively swapping out the failing 2TB drives with 3TB WD Reds. As I replace them out, the NAS will automagically rebuild the array with no data loss, and progressively expand the array aswell.

    Performance is outstanding, fully saturating our 1Gbit network when needed, at the same time it mediashares to 3x Raspberry Pi units running Raspbmc (port of XBMC), as well as running continuous recording of two IP cameras and DVR recording through a Sony Play TV unit plugged directly into the NAS. It also handles our 'Time Machine' backups to all of our computers and I have a small 'Cloud Sync' setup for my documents that syncs my desktop, laptop and android phone with all of my documents automagically.

    Yes, you pay a bit more, and yes there are cheaper solutions out there, but at some point in time you'll appreciate stuff that 'just works' and doesn't consume your waking hours with small problems that need to be sorted out. I've tried software and dedicated hardware NAS solutions in the past built on a standard x86 machine, and while they were alright, down the track something always went awry. The Synology has just worked for me and has not missed a beat.

    The other thing I would suggest if you do go down the NAS path is invest in a small UPS dedicated to the NAS. Your data is important, and that small investment will make sure if there is a power outage that the unit shuts down correctly and safely.

    TLDR: Get a NAS- I recommend a Synology from my own experience. It lets you use multiple size drives with protection. Also invest in a UPS.

    • airzone on 06/10/2014 - 12:52

      Is it loud? A quick google shows a stellar reputation for their higher end soho units. The DS1513+ looks like it's the bomb

      • Bonsaichop on 06/10/2014 - 12:57

        Not at all, each of my units (the DS1010 and the DX510) have dual 92mm fans. You can se the fan speed within the NAS from high med and power saving which is off and periodically turn on at a very low speed when needed. They're going to be as loud as the drives you install (we run WD20EARS and WD30EARX drives which are very quiet to begin with).

        Put it this way, the NAS is in our bedroom. I put it there when I first got the unit as a matter of convenience and to monitor it, however we have just left it there because it was out of the way and didn't make much if any noise.

        The DS1513 is awesome, and I considered a couple of times of upgrading for the hell of it but I could not fault the DS1010 at all and as such have not, and probably will not upgrade unless something disastrous goes wrong.

        • airzone on 06/10/2014 - 14:36

          Damn, I'm sold.. The only issue I have now is that the area that I would put it is 100mb only, and the switch certainly can't handle lacp…. Actually none of my ones can. So if I am going to have to upgrade my switch, then I need to consider if I am going to get a cheapie 1gbe unit, or if I will splash out with a second hand desktop cisco catalyst.. Which I can also use to practice CCNA on.

        • Bonsaichop on 06/10/2014 - 14:48

          It might be cringeworthy but you'll get away with a cheapie gigabit unmanaged switch, unless you're doing some kind of fancy network topology.

          Was running an old Cisco managed for the longest time until it packed it in, to save face I just went out and picked up a cheap 10 port gigabit to get me by, and it still does. I can still get close to 100MB/s which is more than plenty for anything I'm doing.

        • airzone on 06/10/2014 - 15:12

          Nothing fancy… Just more of an opportunity to play with it. Until recently, I had some 3750's and 3750X's, but the missus wouldn't let me install them in the house… I suppose a small rack doesn't exactly go with the decor we have going on. And they weren't exactly quiet.

        • Bonsaichop on 06/10/2014 - 15:44

          Yep, know what you mean. I used to have a 32RU rack that was unwillingly dubbed the 'Computer Fridge', not anymore though :( If you want to go down that path my suggestion would be to get a small 10RU or 8RU cabinet and have it in the garage/laundry depending on your house layout. As a bonus you can get a realtivley cheap high end rackmount UPS and fit it with new SLA batteries.

          Still, for day to day home operations its not really needed, gigabit is plenty.

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