Toronto Photography Meetup Group

Hi All
I currently running a raid setup 0 of 2x 1TB
I am running out of space..

Thinking of expanding .
Would like to hear, from you guys either buy 2 2tbs and add on this setup or buy a new setup all together..

Thanks in advances for the help
cheers
Yeshwanth

Isn't raid 0 a mirror of the 1st drive?

So if you have 2 x 2TB HD you will still only have 2TB of space. I could be wrong and too lazy to google. You may need a new set up with a 4 bay NAS depending what you back up.

Canada Computer had a sale on one by Netgear over the weekend NV+ was the model I think for $250. Has great reviews.

I'm guessing that you are going to try replacing one disk at a time in order to double your space?

I got the Synology 4 bay system. The extra bays certainly make expansion easier (Currently 5.3TB of drives for 3TB usable).

@Imageone
Yes the Raid 0 will mirror on drive to another one.
I am aware of the 2TB option, But wondering is it worth to get 2TB or use two more 1TB and call it drive NEw drive(2x1TB) old drive(2x1TB) ....

@Ben
Yes i will replace one disk at a time...
Thats a good idea but little expensive option ...
Thanks for your input guys ....
Yeshwanth

Raid 0 is typically meant for scratch/temp storage.
Say a single picture file is written onto a raid 0 of a three drive setup:
(Total Storage is the size of the smallest drive x 3 i.e. you have three 1G drives = 3 gig total)

It is split up and written concurrently onto 3 drives so the time to write is super fast.
The tradeoff is that if any one of the three drives dies, then you lose everything. There is no mirroring on raid 0
----------
Raid 1 is mirroring, say you have 2 drive setup
(Total Storage is the smallest size of one drive ie. you have two 1G drives, total space is 1G)

A file is duplicated onto each drive concurrently. If a drive dies no problems.

Raid 5
------
You have a raid 5 setup of three drives each drive is 1G large.
Total storage is n-1 (where n is the number of drives used in the raid array) so in this case you'll have 2 gigs.

A file is copied, and split up onto all 3 drives and will contain parity information meaning if one drive dies, you can pop a new one in and the remaining drives have enough information to rebuild the new one you just replaced. (However if two drives die then you're sol

The performance is quite fast and safe for raid 5.

I used to have a raid 5 setup to contain all of my important data and then a raid 0 setup just for scratch/temp data that photoshop,windows swap etc.


Another good suggestion I have is for non raid data integrity, buy two drives of the same type and firmware. You can fill them both up like you normally would. And if a drive fails, alot of the times it is the circuit board.

I would take the other working drive, back it up. Take the hard drive motherboard and transplant it on the dead circuit board one (and hope its not mechanical). Rip the data out.

edit:
Imageone is talking about a raid 0+1 setup.
raid 0+1 the minimum number of drives for that I believe is 4 drives and storage is n-2

I had the same issue before, but I reconfigured the HD as follows.

1x ssd OS
1x 500 scratch
2x 1TB - raid 0

it's my believe that raid 0 is a performance raid, not a mirror raid like raid 1 or 2.

I do a back up of lightroom catalogs and essential files on an external 2 bay 1tb NAS in raid 0

Thank you Foggy ...
I stand corrected....My setup is Raid 1 and not Raid 0

Cheers

I have been interested in something like this too for a while as I currently have a mix n'bag of LaCie drives.

Your raid 1 setup and a pair of 1tb:
I would not expand on it and go for a brand new set of 2tb x 2 on a separate raid 1 array.

I really like raid 5 as it is fast and data integrity is high and storage efficiency is good n-1

brings the best of both worlds of raid 1 and 0 but you'll need 3 drives minimum and expanding is possible by adding on new drives of the same size or larger in the future.

Good luck on your decision

My setup before was 4 drives dedicated to raid 5 for integrity and then two 10k rpm drives for scratch/swap.. it was super fast and reliable, only problem is my pc felt like it was taking off like a helicopter heh

If you have alot of them lying around why not put em to good use?
You can group them into large drives and small ones. Large for data integrity and small ones for scratch/swap drives. Many motherboards support raid 0, 1 and 5 (pc atleast not sure bout macs) or you could buy some external enclosure but im not really sure how fast they perform unless they are e-sata interfaces.

Expensive in the short term, but the ability to add larger drives over time made more sense to me for the long term. Network storage also reduces the number of chained HD enclosures around my workstation. Before that I was investing in FW800 storage, which is fast but not very cost effective.
Since most NAS these days run linux and aren't encumbered by NTFS (or any M$ filesystem) I'm pretty happy with the result.

I have been running a DLink DNS-323 (Linux based) for years and upgraded from 500's to 1.5TB drives and it runs like a champ. I think with current firmware it will support 2TB drives. I can write to it at 150Mbps and it has dropped in price to 99.99.

http://www.shopbot.ca/pp-d-link-dns-323 ... 41299.html

For the cost of the units, I would buy a second one instead of upgrading in place and I would recommend to run in RAID 1 config (mirrored) always.

I keep older images on the NAS and LR reaches out to get them as required and it runs fine, not a quick as local storage but way more flexible.

I have also heard good things about Drobo's but have no direct experience with them.

A lack of NTFS doesn't necessarily mean no issues, my NAS is an older device that uses EXT3, so it's limited to 2TB volumes. As long as you aren't running EXT3 or FAT32 you should be good in terms of filesystem on a NAS.

NTFS is actually an excellent filesystem encumbered by a mediocre OS. It's one of the best bits of design work to come out of MS although it does lack some of the features that make more modern FS's a potentially better choice (MS has been adding them slowly, but EXT4 and ReiserFS have a faster dev cycle).

Drobo's are slow, massively overpriced and easy. The latter is their only selling feature. They are a good choice for the non-technical as they auto-add new drives and auto-rebuild drive sets if you replace a failed drive. But if you're technical enough to install a bare drive their advantages aren't generally worth it.

You can get far better NAS boxes for less money (typically a good 4 bay ethernet unit costs a bit less than a bare USB Drobo). Even the Home Server devices from HP, Acer and similar offer more features for generally less money.

Thanks for Mentioning ..
The DNS 323 i own ...Is really slow,
I cannot use it from catalogue( lightroom) I can ..but slow
Since it works as a network storage...

Would prefer to get some Usb storage and I assume thats going to be faster than this ..or thinking about some RAID card which can do this for me ..If thats going to increase the speed ...
Thanks Foggy,Mawz,BEn,Jamesy and David

Interesting question and here's what I've got setup/planned.

Currently have this:
1 x 80GB SSD for OS
1 x 80GB SSD for Scratch/Lightroom catalog (plan to get, don't have it yet)
1 x 500GB HD for storage

For high availability I use a DNS-323 with 2x2TB raid 1 and for backup I use 2x1 TB external drives with one being off site storage (keep it at work and update it monthly). I'm pretty neurotic about my data after losing 100 GB back in the day. What I did was upgrade the 2x1TB drives I originally had in the 323 with 2TB drives and move the 1's to be backups.

Always remember that raid isn't backup

Forgot to add, i use scheduled jobs (SynchToy in Win7) to move data around from the current 500GB drive to the DNS and when I add the second SSD for scratch/lightroom I'll just stage the data to keep it all off-loaded from the SSD.

thank you DIMITRIS for sharing ur setup...
yea the RAID IS NOT A BACKUP..lol

planning to Get 2 x 2TB drives...
thnking of caviar green since its only 69$ and yea i know its only 5900RPM ...
but its going to be only backup Its not my primary drive...
what do u think abt that ....
cheers

For me, the speed of the drives in my 323 is not important, the raid is kind of a backup/something happens to may main drive kind of thing. I've got Samsung drives that are 5900RPM in there. I keep my current and previous year of photo's on the main drive in my desktop (500GB 7200RPM) and move other years onto the 323. If you plan on working off of your raid drive, then drive and network speed become more important. I don't usually spend a lot of time on older photo's and when I do need them I just go grab them from the 323. I also store all of my movies/music on the 323 which can then be streamed to my TV or my PC or laptop, so the 323 act's a central hub with more uses than just photo storage.

If I was running a business I would separate my person data on the 323 with my work data for obvious reasons although knowing me I'd end up with as much redundancy as I could afford.

If you want to use an external storage as main + backup, there are 4 bay devices out there with USB 3 / e-sata connection, which should resolve the speed issue.

Like you said, it is difficult to use a NAS as main since the connection is slow. Even with the fastest RPM drives accessing bunch of raws from a NAS will be slow. For NAS those green caviar drives work perfect.

I personnaly use the following:

500GB on as main on laptop.
500GB external drive as backup.
1TB x2 as RAID 1 on NAS 1 as backup.
2TX x2 as RAID 1 on NAS 2 as backup.

you can never be too redundant~ I hide the extrnal drive in case of theft lol.

I recently bought this unit that I populated with 4 Seagate green 2TB SATA hard drives, then connected to my web server via eSATA, as RAID-5. So far, so good.

http://www.pccanada.com/viewitem.asp?id=28620

I'm another that is using the DNS-323 NAS. Has 2x1TB WD greens. Has been rock steady so far. Using something called DirSync for daily backups. Saved my bacon already as my 1.5tb drive that had all my photos (plus other stuff) died just a few months ago. Unfortunately I wasn't backing up my LR3 catalog...but otherwise got everything back. Well worth the price.
Unfortunately I'm almost out of space so will be either upgrading of getting another NAS...haven't decided yet.

I too am using a DNS-323, more as a media server access by a XBMC and some 360s. I had no problems with it so far except when transfering data when I u/g the drives. Yes it's slow.

Dlink did come out with a newer DNS-320 which is suppose to be faster than the DNS-323. Don't know why they used a lower model number. Word is the 323 will be discountinued in support and future suport will turn to the 320.

I'm looking to u/g to a 4 bay NAS or add on to the 323. May go with the Netgear NV+ when it goes on sale again.

Thanks to Every one for the kind replies...

I Picked up 2 x 2TB green seagate drives yesterday ...
on the 192.168.1.32 page it displays them as 2000GB
but on my mapped drive it is still showing it as 1TB drive..
I am not sure where i am doing wrong....

Inititally I had 2x 1TB drives. I replaced on of it with this one 2TB drive and once the data was automatically mirrored, I replaced the other 2TB in it ..
Now I think in both the drives the datas are mirrored ..

I did upgrade to Firmware 1.09..(latest)
Any inputs will be greatly appreciated
Yeshwanth

For the first drive you transplanted (from 1T to 2T) then it performed the mirror rebuild. The 2T was rebuilt as a 1Terrabyte is what should happen. All the extra space is ignored. But on your config page, it shows as a 2TB? I bet that is based on the hd bios attributes.

Usually in raid 1 arrays, once you define the raid array, swapping a larger hard drive and rebuilding it should not grow the capacity.

I would copy the raid 1, 1TB content onto another drive (JBOD non raid drive),
swap your 2TB drives into your raid enclosure. Copy the contents into the new raid 1 array that consists of 2TB x 2.

Yeah, if you are replacing an existing raid 1 HD with another HD that is bigger I think you're supposed to create a partition. Main one which matches the size of existing drive and second partition for remaining space. That way you can utilize the full size while using existing raid 1 system.

What foggy suggested is what I did, I made a new raid with new drives and simply copied all the files manually. Took 20 hours lol.

Here I am resurrecting an old thread, but I was reminded today that I should really backup my images better.

One person I know, who happens to work for Vistek was suggesting this to me: http://vistek.ca/store/StorageDevices/2 ... 00fw4.aspx but what I'm trying to figure out is whether there is something the same/similar that is less money... seems a little expensive for what it does... or is it because it's vistek?

Get a drobo Chris when they're on sale and you're set.

I'm not familiar with Wiebetech, it got eSata which is great, but I'd trust Netgear, here's a cheaper 4 bay GigE NAS.

http://www.ncix.com/products/?sku=26059&vpn=RND4000-100NAS&manufacture=Netgear

It could be because it is Vistek, but also that it's local storage with all of the different connexions, most of which you probably won't use (eSATA, FW? You can't use them all at the same time).

The consumer NAS throughout the thread just has cheapo USB and ethernet which could be some of the reason for the difference.

I for one would definitely use eSATA.