Question Temporary Storage of Movies prior setting up RAID

markymiles

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I'm looking at cheapest possible options for a 4 Bay Raid 5 NAS or equivalent.

I've been resisting having all movies on a NAS due primarily to costs so have accumulated over the years 4 USB 3/2 Drives which are fairly full of Bluray Rips in MKV format. 3 drives are 4tb and 1 is 3tb. I probably have around 10TB of movies.

I know there are favoured NAS drives which these won't be but to get going I could open up the enclosures and use them in the NAS, then slowly replace with WD Red's when funds allow. Problem being obviously they would be wiped when setting up the Raid array.

So I'm just thinking of solutions, I just need the movies stored temporarily then put back on. Is this something offered by anyone. Worst case scenario I'd have to buy two Red's in Raid 1 and fill them up and convert to Raid 5 as I empty the others and install. This is not the cheapest option though.
 
Or if there is another (cheap) way of networking the existing drives without wiping and providing some redundancy please let me know.
 
Not only will you very likely wipe the drives when inserting them into a RAID array, it's likely that you will wipe them again converting from (say) RAID1 to RAID5. Though nowadays there are some clever RAID controllers out there that might avail conversion "on the fly" - however I'd check very carefully that your proposed purchase avails such if you want to go that way. And even then, I wouldn't want to try it without a backup (indeed I wouldn't want to add a drive containing data to a RAID array without a backup.)

Fundamentally there's no silver bullets. The best way would be to build you NAS populated with empty drives in the desired RAID configuration (or JBOD,) then copy the data across (whether by network or USB.) There's no "cheap" way of "emptying out" your existing drives without buying more drives. About the only cheap way is if you have existing capacity "in hand" already somewhere - can you find a few TB of space amongst your incumbent laptop/desktop devices (or can you "borrow" it from a mate/work?) - then shuffle things around creatively.

If there was any cheaper way to store bulk data than mechanical hard disc drives, we'd be using it instead of HDD's. (Of course, there's tapes, but I'd be willing to bet the average SOHO user has never even seen a "computer" tape drive, let alone have one lying around somewhere.)
 
Yeah thanks, it's just a big investment in one go, decent 4 Bay Nas and say 4 x 4TB drives minimum gets you to around £1k. That'll require a lot of saving, if I ever get there.

Was just thinking I would risk using the existing drives in Raid 5 without a back up if I was able to find such a place or "friend" with some TB available. On thinking about it, would make more sense to keep all existing drives as a back up should a disaster happen on the NAS.

Guess this will be my next project, later in the year. Will keep an eye on the classifieds..........
 
In theory, if you had time on your hands, you could upload all your data to a cloud location, then copy it all back down....still a cost attached tho.
 
Yeah I have reasonably quick upload speed on my fibre of 20meg so I'll have a look at how much cloud storage costs. In the process of a little spring clean deleting things I'll never watch again to try and shrink the size needed. I have one drive so that's 1tb taken care of.
 
Anyone used hubiC? 10tb for €5 a month seems cheap.
 
I had the same issue as you and found a slightly cheaper way.

Buy a bigger NAS.

I know it seems odd but buying a larger NAS meant I could reuse my old drives. Synology use a system called hybrid raid (SHR) which gives single or dual disk redundancy, the benefit is you can mix drive sizes without losing any space.

RAID Calculator - Support | Synology Inc.

It was a bit of a faff but I needed 4x6TB drives to meet my needs so instead I bought an 8 bay and 2x4TB drives and a hot swappable desktop drive dock. Copied stuff from the smaller drives onto one of the 4's then added them to the NAS and kept repeating and expanding the array until I was done.

Note that you can't add a smaller drive than the smallest that's already in it, so you can't chuck in a couple of 4TB and then add your 2TB drives if using SHR.

I'd also add that any form of RAID isn't backup, it's redundancy. If your NAS fails or the array borks then you'll lose everything, so there's more money unless you're prepared to rip everything again.
 
Anyone used hubiC? 10tb for €5 a month seems cheap.

There are reasons it's cheap, there are several reviews online. But the general problem with Cloud storage of large volumes of data are the transfer rates with domestic internet lines. For example, to upload 1TB of data over a 20 Mbit/s connection, assuming 100% utilization and efficiency, will take over 4.8 days. In practice, I would expect the actual transfer rate to be not much better than 50% of that - so somewhere around 10 days to upload 1TB, or 3 months to upload the 10TB of data you have!

Doh! Missing decimal point in calculations - now corrected.
 
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Thanks chaps yep I think a bigger NAS will be the best idea and probably a Synology one with SHR would be of benefit.

Testing hubiC. Left it running overnight, currently it's uploaded almost 50gb in roughly 12 hours. So assume 100gb a day and with my collection now trimmed to 8Tb that's 80 days to upload everything assuming my maths is correct. Might carry on anyway so I have a back up at least.
 
You don't need to have all your HDDs in the NAS. For example, whilst I do keep separate backups, I have a 2-bay Zyxel NAS with 2 HDDs just JBOD, and transferred data onto those initially from back up. But I just use an external enclosure connected to the NAS via USB for another 4 HDDs which I had previously used as standalone / not-networked. I didn't have to format or move data on any of the external HDDs in the enclosure, so in theory you could buy a single-bay NAS, put 1 HDD in it and then just put the other existing HDDs in an enclosure connected to the NAS.

This doesn't provide any more back up than you currently have, but neither would RAID on a NAS. The main disadvantages are that you need an extra power socket for the enclosure (and some space, but not much), and the cost of the enclosure, but that plus a smaller NAS would be less than a 4-bay NAS typically.
 
Haha, that's such a good idea. I do have a single Bay Zyxel Nas which I use for music. I didn't think to try adding an enclosure to that. It's not USB 3 though so I could upgrade to something a bit better. I have plenty of space so not worried about size or power points.

Do the HD enclosures power down when not in use? I suppose I could just do that manually so not a deal breaker.

I think I'll keep an eye out for a cheap 4 bay anyway for future proofing but use my existing drives as you mentioned. Oh and slowly upload my movies for back up. I am still getting around 100gb uploaded per day so not so bad and I can cope with €5 a month.

Cool I knew the forums wouldn't let me down [emoji2]
 
Do the HD enclosures power down when not in use? I suppose I could just do that manually so not a deal breaker.
The one I have (Hornettek 4-bay, the cylindrical one, still for sale on eBay) does when the Zyxel NAS powers down (I only put my NAS on at set times for movies), which is good, as the fan is a bit noisy (I do leave it on full, so the HDD's won't overheat, but I am sure I could turn the fan down if I wanted to, but it's in another room so no need). HTH
 
Ok thanks. I need a new Nas regardless as mine seems to only recognise small disk sizes on the USB connection. Grabbed a 4TB drive off the classifieds today so will use that as my main NAS drive. I do have a dual bay usb 3 HD caddy already so can use that when I grab a new NAS with a couple of my existing 4tb drives. Think Im sorted now thanks.
 
That's an interesting read. Seems like the HGST Enterprise drives fare the best, which weren't on my radar.
 
1Tb uploaded :clap:

Slow progress but at least it's something I guess.

Following advice on this thread, have bought a cheap 2 bay NAS with a couple usb3 ports and one 4tb WD Red. So should be able to move existing drives around and get it all sorted either with an enclosure or just directly plugged in as is. When I've got the cash will get another 4tb Red for the 2nd internal bay which will mean I only need to have one drive as USB 3 and can have a full back up of everything without needing to store anything in the cloud.

Will grab a bigger NAS in the future with 5/6 bays.

Finally all networked :smashin:
 
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