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PostPosted: Fri Oct 14, 2011 10:14 am 
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I'm a fan of the QNAP product line. A far more robust and proven product in that space for anyone who's serious about an external NAS that's feature rich, performs well, and is easy to use.

While Drobos are solid products as external drives, last I checked they were atrocious on a network. They required a separate ethernet adapter which ended up actually going through the Drobo's USB port.


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PostPosted: Tue Oct 18, 2011 11:15 pm 
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I did a little window shopping at Canada Computers, and found a line called Mediasonic. A quick google review turned up some good, and the enclosures are cheap. Can anyone tell me what I gain by going to say a Wiebetech, which I've noticed is at a higher price point?

Based on the issues of the proprietary rails, I'm definitely not looking at LaCie for this RAID solution.

In a perfect world, what I'm looking for is a eSATA or USB 3.0 Raid enclosure for RAID 1, and be able to directly connect an eSATA external hard drive and get an automatic duplication for remote storage. I notice that the latter feature is more typical of a NAS raid, but NAS's don't have the speed I'm looking for.

Thoughts from the experts?


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PostPosted: Wed Oct 19, 2011 1:25 pm 
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You'd have to do a feature-by-feature comparison, to know for sure, but my gut says "not much." As I posted on page one I'm using a Mediasonic RAID solution, connected to my server via eSATA. I didn't bother using their software, as I have a timed backup solution I use, so I can't speak to it's utility.


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PostPosted: Wed Oct 19, 2011 6:42 pm 
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If you can find out what the raid chipset being used i.e. promise/silicon image etc.

I would go with the more popular raid chipset, as each manufacturer's raid implementation is proprietary. So if the box dies, you will have to find another raid box with an equivalent raid chipset.


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PostPosted: Thu Oct 20, 2011 11:29 am 
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hotwire wrote:
I did a little window shopping at Canada Computers, and found a line called Mediasonic. A quick google review turned up some good, and the enclosures are cheap. Can anyone tell me what I gain by going to say a Wiebetech, which I've noticed is at a higher price point?


I can't speak for Wiebetech, specifically, but I can share with you some of what I had looked at when I went through a similar process a couple of years ago. Some of the differences I found between lower end NAS units and higher end ones were:

- Overall build quality
- Ease of hard drive installation
- Ability to hot swap hard drives (particularly important for units with more than 2 drive bays)
- Performance: this is a consequence of hardware specs (for example, connectivity, usb/firewire/ethernet), chipset, etc
- Type of supported RAID (many units only support RAID 0, 1, or 0 + 1. Far less support RAID 5 which is what I use as I can hot swap without rebuilding the volumes.
- Software support: Quality of the operating system running on the unit (most are *NIX based), frequency of updates of the OS, feature set of the OS.

For reference, here's some of my own performance tests that I ran with 3 units that I had: http://www.mattandcess.com/journal/2010 ... undup.html


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PostPosted: Sun Oct 23, 2011 8:56 pm 
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If you have an old PC (like a pII or PIII or AMD Duron) and some inner geek. For the cost of the hard disks and a SATA card go with freenas BSD based it is solid and it rocks:

http://www.freenas.org/features


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PostPosted: Mon Nov 28, 2011 3:12 pm 
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So I went with the laziest and cheapest option available to me: an ~20 dollar PCI-E card with two eSATA ports capable of raid. Existing 2TB LaCie and and a recent 2TB WD drive in a new enclosure on the RAID connected to the two eSATA ports.

I believe the new drive enclosure is also capable of USB 3.0, anyway the reason I mention this is that could I disconnect one of the two drives, take it with me somewhere, plug into my laptop and use lightroom on it, and then plug the drive back into the Raid and the changes would sync to the 2nd drive, or is it more complicated than that?


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PostPosted: Mon Nov 28, 2011 3:52 pm 
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hotwire wrote:
, or is it more complicated than that?

Yes it is more complicated than that, data redundancy is not the same as data syncing


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PostPosted: Mon Nov 28, 2011 8:32 pm 
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I have the Mediasonic for another Raid 1 and it took forever to initialize the mirror. However I've had it for over 2 yrs without any issues (have raw files accessed by Lightroom). The Vantec NexStar MX that I have now with the Sata connection is extremely fast by comparison, as the other is USB 2.


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PostPosted: Mon Nov 28, 2011 9:27 pm 
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mings wrote:
hotwire wrote:
, or is it more complicated than that?

Yes it is more complicated than that, data redundancy is not the same as data syncing


Far more complicated.
Redundant data shares files that you do not typically see to read/write and verify.
Hot swap services ensure that when drive a is removed, the other drives have the capacity to temporarily take load and to manage this data in an efficient form.

As was posted above, if you wish to do this you should be more interested in a Network Attached Storage (NAS) system. Then you could take your drive with it's data, or lack there of, and put things on it, and do as you will and then copy the new data onto your redundant server.

If you are using lightroom this is more efficient than you may think as if the catalog is stored on this drive (with backed up copies) you can take the drive around sans old photos and lightroom won't really mind unless you desire to edit one or two of them.

Anywho, before I go too far off on a tangent, the best solution based on your hoped solution is to get three drives. 2 are redundant to offer you the security of the backup and the third merely hosts copies of data for you and that you as the diligent user ensures that things are correctly placed onto your redundant drives.

God, I hope that was clear enough.

I am personally working on this method though with the "free" drive plugged into my workstation full-time and the redundant storage sitting across the room in the NAS.


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