Hey Everyone,
Steve here from PC Budget Solutions and I would like to ask some of the more senior people a question.
I built a server recently that holds 2 bits of Information. One is archiving videos and raw footage for my YouTube Channel and the other is personal storage for my wife & I. Of course she does not have access to anything business related.
I am using UNRaid and after tons of stupid mistakes it’s running perfectly. What I’ve noticed is, sync time is stupidly long. I have a gigabyte switch and NIC and it runs parity syncs and array rebuilds around 110MB/s but 3TB takes 8 hours. I feel like this is not a software issue but my network speed correct? or does FreeNAS or other software raids do this much quicker?
Secondly, looking for cloud storage to the server (just business items), but need around 1TB now but will be around 2-3TB by end of the year. My G Suite account caps at 30GB, and 1TB/month is $10. Not steep but addin quickbooks cloud and other things, I want something of better value. Any recommendations are welcome!
You shouldn’t need to do array rebuilds very often. Rebuilds only happen if there is a failure event and the raid software/hardware needs to restore data to parity drives or if you’re adding additional disks (rebalance).
As for my opinion on cloud storage. They are costlier (in general) than DIY because you are paying paying for the expertise and hardware rental. For a cheaper option, you can try BackBlaze. They have a flat cost per system with no caps; however, they are not ideal for backing up large amounts (multi-TB) of data.
If you’re interested in DIY, I’d head over to reddit.com/r/datahoarder . However, be warned that some people are quite religious about storage solutions (e.g. pro-ZFS people are the most zealous of the lot).
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Curiously: why do you need Cloud storage? Just as an off-site backup? Or the ability to access it from anywhere?
Correct, offsite backup in case of say fire.
Just build your own. Do you have a friend or relative that also has a relatively uncapped Broadband connection?
If so, just build or buy another NAS and store it there.
Upload to it.
I use a QNAP 4-bay (residential) NAS, and i can access it from anywhere. Their commercial NAS enclosures have all the bells and whistles. My Aunt (a CPA) has a pair of them - one in her office, and one at her home that the office NAS backs up to twice a week late at night. (And every night during tax season, so now-April).
Also, while we’re on this topic, i discovered that this external WD drive:
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/wd-easystore-8tb-external-usb-3-0-hard-drive-black/5792401.p?skuId=5792401
has an 8TB WD Red NAS drive in it. The bare drive costs more than buying this external and shucking it. It is basically always on sale for the 159-179$ range, so if you’re looking for drives to populate a NAS or just add a huge pile of storage…
Buy and shuck. Save 40%.
If you don’t need your backup data immediately you can use AWS S3 and glacier. 3 TB will cost you about $75 a month but you can reduce that cost down to like $25 with glacier. The problem is you have to pay for egres traffic if you need to get your data off S3 buckets (remember TCP acks are also egres). Also glacier has like a 4 hour SLA so you have to wait for the data to be available and then down it off S3.