On Jan 23, 2010, at 12:04, Simon Breden wrote:
And I think your 750GB choice should be a good one. I'm currently
using 750GB drives (WD7500AAKS) and they have worked flawlessly over
the last 2 years. But knowing that drives don't last forever, it's
time I looked for some new ones, assuming they can be reasonably
assumed to be reliable from customer ratings and reports.
If there's one manufacturer that *may* possibly have proved the
exception, it might be Samsung with their 1.5TB and 2TB drives --
see my post just a little further up.
Have your storage needs expanded such that you've outgrown your
current capacity? It may seem counter-intuitive, but is it worth
considering replacing your current 750 GB drives with newer 750 GB
drives, instead of going to a larger size?
Would simply buying new drives be sufficient to get a new warranty,
and presumably a device that has less wear on it? More is not always
better (though it is more :).
For resilvering to be required, I presume this will occur mostly in
the event of a mechanical failure. Soft failures like bad sectors
will presumably not require resilvering of the whole drive to occur,
as these types of error are probably easily fixable by re-writing
the bad sector(s) elsewhere using available parity data in redundant
arrays. So in this case larger capacities and resilvering time
shouldn't become an issue, right?
Correct. Though it's recommended to run a 'scrub' on a regular
(weekly?) basis to make sure data corruption / bit flipping is caught
early. This will take some time and eat I/O, but can be done during
low traffic times (overnight?). Scrubbing (like resilvering) is only
done over used blocks, and not over the entire drive(s).
And there's one big item of huge importance here, which is often
overlooked by people, and that is the fact that one should always
have a reasonably current backup available. Home RAID users often
pay out the money for a high-capacity NAS and then think they're
safe from failure, but a backup is still required to guard against
loss.
Depends on what the NAS is used for. It may be backup volume for the
desktops / laptops of the house. In which case it's not /that/
essential for a backup of the backup to be done--though copying the
data to an external drive regularly, and taking that offsite (work)
would be useful in the case of fire or burglary.
Of course if the NAS is the 'primary' data store for any data, and
you're not replicating that data anywhere, you're tempting fate. There
are two types of computer users: those have experienced catastrophic
data failure, and those that will.
I use OS X at home and have a FireWire drive for Time Machine, but I
also purchased a FW dock and two stand-alone hard drives in which I
use SuperDuper! to clone my boot volume to every Sunday. Then on
Monday I take the drive ("A") to work, and bring back the one I have
there (Disk "B"). The syncing takes about 25 minutes each week with
minimal effort (plug-in drive, launch SD!, press "Copy").
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