Unfortunately no one can be told what fun_plug is - you have to see it for yourself.
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Hi,
I have purchased a DNS-323 but now am hesitating when it comes to purchasing disks and setting up a RAID or backup solution. I'd appreciate advice.
I already own one brand new 1.5Tb WD disk. Would it be ok to get a second, identical disk? A friend suggests that if the disks are used in a RAID 1 array, they wear down evenly, and it's possible that both can fail within a short window of time... is this true? I'm considering buying a similarly sized disk from a different manufacturer to avoid this..
My second issue is to decide between using rsync or a RAID system. My priority is in maintaining a safe copy of my data, and a read performance boost is secondary to that. Should I aim to have one main disk and rsync everything to the other disk periodically? In this situation I could just throw away the defective disk and rsync a new one, right? Any tips, strategies and suggestions would be most welcome!
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In my experience there is rarely a predictable pattern to disk failure - it certainly does not "wear down evenly" as for example a tire on your car might do, one disk might run for a year, whilst another might run for a decade, under apparently identical conditions. It is possible (and I have witnessed it) to have two disks from the same manufacturing batch fail within a very short space of time, due to faulty manufacture, but this is the exception rather than the norm, and I've actually participated in "pre-emptive" disk replacements where techs were sent out with replacement disks and imaging software to completely clone the users existing disk before the failure occured.
You can use different brands or the same make & model, whatever suits you - your chances of having both disks fail simultaenously, one disk fail or no disk failure at all aren't significantly different.
With regard data "preservation" - that's not the intent of RAID systems - RAID1 is about availability, about continuing to have uninterrupted access to the data even though a disk may have failed - if you don't need it, then you don't want to use RAID1, as for rsyncing to the second disk - let me ask you this - what do you do if the DNS-323 itself fails and you lose access to both disks?
You need to consider backing the data up to another device.
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If I understand right, if the DNS-323 should fail then I'll have to plug the disks into a linux machine to read the ext2 filesystem... Alternatively, just buy another DNS-323. Uninterrupted access isn't a priority for me, this is for working with (and safely storing) home video camera footage and still images. Losing the data would be a catastrophe, but temporary unavailability is just an inconvenience. Am I on the right track with using rsync to duplicate the data then?
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innovine wrote:
Am I on the right track with using rsync to duplicate the data then?
You're on the right track as far as not using RAID is concerned - rsync to duplicate the data between disks is a reasonable approach, although I would personally prefer to see back ups done to a different unit, and I would strongly suggest that you verify that you can access the data from your linux system reasonably early in the process.
I'm not certain if you're aware of it, but the latest beta firmware (1.09) allows an "online backup feature" which itself is in beta - you might like to explore this as another avenue for backing up your data.
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