Any benefits of multiple drives vs one single drive?

[lightsout 156]

I am looking to grab an 8TB drive during the holiday sales to replace by 4x2TB drives. 

 

Is there any concern with emby accessing the drive for multiple clients? I think this happens now without issue but just want to be sure before I swap everything over.

 

I know I risk losing all my data in one go, which does have me a little nervous.

[ebr 16184]

No issue for Emby but I generally like more smaller drives over fewer larger ones for the reason you state - eventually something will fail and this limits the damage.  I have settled at 3TB max.

 

In either case, I suggest some sort of drive pooling solution to make future changes to the physical drives transparent to the software accessing them.

[Deathsquirrel 745]

My storage server is all 8TB drives.  No problems at all with Emby reading the large volumes.

 

Yes, you do risk more catastrophic losses from a single drive failure but obviously there are ways around that with RAID and backups.  If I were running 3TB drives I'd need three times as many drives and have 3 times the chance of a drive failing on any given day.  Tradeoffs

[Gilgamesh_48 1240]

My file server is a bunch of external USB drives (50tb total) consisting of one 3tb drive and a bunch of 4tb and a bunch of 5 tb drives pooled using StableBit's Drivepool software. It is absolutly stable.

 

I have X2 duplication turned on for all my video, audio and picture files. (X3 for a very few really important unrecoverable files) What that means is that every important file is duplicated and DrivePool makes sure that the files are never stored twice on the same drive. One more thing is that DrivePool stores all files in regular Window's format which actually gives some more redundancy in that even without DrivePool running or with the drives connected to a completly different computer that is able to read Windows files the files are totally accessible.

 

I've been running that setup for many years (since at least 2012) and I have had only 2 issues one was an actual drive failure and the other was when I dropped a drive when I was rebuilding the rack that hods my server. In neither case was any data lost and the operation of my system was completely uninterrupted and, when I replaced the failed drive and told DrivePool to include it in the pool, Drivepool automatically reduplicated the files involved and re-balanced the drives so the load was equalized.

 

So I would recommend keeping the largest drive at 5tb and under and using Drive pooling software to pool the drives and using duplication of some kind as protection for most data that is at all hard to recreate.

 

Remember, Storage is cheap nowadays and I think that having enough storage for decent duplication and a good bit of room for expansion is more than a good idea it is simply common sense.

[lightsout 156]

My file server is a bunch of external USB drives (50tb total) consisting of one 3tb drive and a bunch of 4tb and a bunch of 5 tb drives pooled using StableBit's Drivepool software. It is absolutly stable.

 

I have X2 duplication turned on for all my video, audio and picture files. (X3 for a very few really important unrecoverable files) What that means is that every important file is duplicated and DrivePool makes sure that the files are never stored twice on the same drive. One more thing is that DrivePool stores all files in regular Window's format which actually gives some more redundancy in that even without DrivePool running or with the drives connected to a completly different computer that is able to read Windows files the files are totally accessible.

 

I've been running that setup for many years (since at least 2012) and I have had only 2 issues one was an actual drive failure and the other was when I dropped a drive when I was rebuilding the rack that hods my server. In neither case was any data lost and the operation of my system was completely uninterrupted and, when I replaced the failed drive and told DrivePool to include it in the pool, Drivepool automatically reduplicated the files involved and re-balanced the drives so the load was equalized.

 

So I would recommend keeping the largest drive at 5tb and under and using Drive pooling software to pool the drives and using duplication of some kind as protection for most data that is at all hard to recreate.

 

Remember, Storage is cheap nowadays and I think that having enough storage for decent duplication and a good bit of room for expansion is more than a good idea it is simply common sense.

Thanks for that software, I agree with your last statement it just comes down to finances. This is a hobby for me, so hundreds of dollars on disks, especially if we are talking about redundancy is not really in the cards.

[lightsout 156]

 

 

In either case, I suggest some sort of drive pooling solution to make future changes to the physical drives transparent to the software accessing them.

Can you elaborate on this please? How come?

[ebr 16184]

Can you elaborate on this please? How come?

 

See post 4.  There are other options as well.

[lightsout 156]

My file server is a bunch of external USB drives (50tb total) consisting of one 3tb drive and a bunch of 4tb and a bunch of 5 tb drives pooled using StableBit's Drivepool software. It is absolutly stable.

 

I have X2 duplication turned on for all my video, audio and picture files. (X3 for a very few really important unrecoverable files) What that means is that every important file is duplicated and DrivePool makes sure that the files are never stored twice on the same drive. One more thing is that DrivePool stores all files in regular Window's format which actually gives some more redundancy in that even without DrivePool running or with the drives connected to a completly different computer that is able to read Windows files the files are totally accessible.

 

I've been running that setup for many years (since at least 2012) and I have had only 2 issues one was an actual drive failure and the other was when I dropped a drive when I was rebuilding the rack that hods my server. In neither case was any data lost and the operation of my system was completely uninterrupted and, when I replaced the failed drive and told DrivePool to include it in the pool, Drivepool automatically reduplicated the files involved and re-balanced the drives so the load was equalized.

 

So I would recommend keeping the largest drive at 5tb and under and using Drive pooling software to pool the drives and using duplication of some kind as protection for most data that is at all hard to recreate.

 

Remember, Storage is cheap nowadays and I think that having enough storage for decent duplication and a good bit of room for expansion is more than a good idea it is simply common sense.

I have been playing around with the trial and am really liking it so far. Don't think I have used an easier software.I may just buy the 8TB external I was looking at, but instead of pulling it out of the case, add it to the pool with all my drives that I currently have and leave it as external.

 

I could also just leave everything as it is and copy everything over to the external and just have it as backup. Not as robust but then I could have all the files on the external so that they could be mobile.

 

Does anyone know of a software that would do that. Monitor multiple drives and copy their content to an external whenever they get new data?

[lightsout 156]

See post 4.  There are other options as well.

Sorry for the double I failed on the multi quote. ebr would you care to list any other options. I used flexraid in the past.

[rbjtech 5284]

My personal view is for static file systems (ie Video collection) it is a waste of power/storage to have 2 platters spinning with the same redundant data.  What is more important is an OFFLINE or isolated backup of that data.

 

What if you delete files by mistake or a virus/ransomware kindly deletes/encrypts them all for you - no RAID/Drive Pool is going to protect you from this as it just mirrors the request on all the disks .... 

 

Also when upgrading, I use the older smaller disks as offline backups for the newer larger disks, so say I upgrade to a 8Gb disk, then the 2 x 4Gb disk I took out become the offline backup for the 8 (so I still get to use them for a valid purpose).

 

For frequently changing file systems - then of course RAID is a good solution - so I actually hold all my 'data' drives on RAID but keep all my Video on non-resilient JBOD - the best of both worlds.

 

For backup automation I use SyncBack Pro - I believe there is a free version available.

[dcook 299]

Another thing to keep in mind is the more drives you add (regardless of size) the more power consumption you have, the more heat generated and the more noise.