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Sophia.

macrumors member
Original poster
Mar 15, 2013
86
0
United Kingdom
No need for a 2.6 GHz quad core server, a 2.3 GHz quad core Mac mini, even the dual core i5 Mac mini, will more than suffice.
But also know, that the Mac mini only takes notebook drives, which are 2.5", and there currently are no 3 TB HDDs in that form factor. The 3 TB HDDs you looked at are 3.5" desktop HDDs and will not fit inside the Mac mini.

And if you get the Mac mini as server, there is no need for that much capacity inside of it if you connect the HDDs externally to it, but as NAS features its own server software anyway.

I may not have come upon this reading the entire thread, thus the following question: Is it 200 TB of data you have or 200 TB of storage capacity?

Do you ever plan to take the week or two to properly sort it and consolidate the data?

Forgot about the size thanks. :) I already have the Mac mini was those specs I was given it at Christmas. I was planning to put new hard drives in it but forgot about the size difference.

We have 200 TB of data I've triple checked. I'm not sure how much of this can be freed up when we move to off site online storage but I plan to take a week off to start consolidating our data.

The good news is we cannot accept new clients at the moment due to our size we are fully booked to September. So there shouldn't be any large spikes in the amount of new data storage we need until then. Hopefully by then I will have home and office storage sorted.

The new G-Tech drive is light years faster than the Drobo I feel sorry for the chap I sold it to. :eek:
 
Last edited:

utekineir

macrumors 6502
Feb 20, 2008
327
1
the £5000 is our current profit once overheads and salaries have been paid.

Data storage may be the least of your concerns.

Also, after factoring in redundancy for 200+tb, your budget is blown multiple times over.

Time to consolidate stuff.
 

deconstruct60

macrumors G5
Mar 10, 2009
12,219
3,821
The disks can be installed in other machines while we get a replacement though unlike the Drobo.

Depends. The "raid 5" ( or even RAID 1) format of the disks can be RAID controller specific. You'd be mostly in the same place Drobo puts you on needed duplicate hardware RAID controller to "read" the data.

If Serving just individual disks as individual volumes then hardware portable.

Once using some sort of virutal disk layout ( Fusion , Drobo raid , synology raid , G-tech raid , etc. ) then the "back-up" is another copy somewhere else.


Plus I got it on sale it was only £459 + 2 year warranty. It's only for time machine anyway and I still have money left over from the sale of the Drobo. :cool:

You probably want to put some "extra" money into a battery backed UPS for that storage. All of these boxes Drobo, Synology , etc. typically don't behave well if suddenly cut power. They may have internal battery to keep the RAID 5 metadata consistent but a far more safe state is shutdown and off if there is no power ( and don't have to be up 24/7/365).

Can have a UPS system set up to just do a shutdown if the power is off for XX minutes then trigger a clean shutdown. (where XX is substantially smaller than the UPS's battery time).

Frankly I suspect much of the drama folks had with Drobo systems was corruption cause from external factors as much as the Drobo internals. Those factors don't change much if just swap out the Drobo.
 

Sophia.

macrumors member
Original poster
Mar 15, 2013
86
0
United Kingdom
Depends. The "raid 5" ( or even RAID 1) format of the disks can be RAID controller specific. You'd be mostly in the same place Drobo puts you on needed duplicate hardware RAID controller to "read" the data.

If Serving just individual disks as individual volumes then hardware portable.

Once using some sort of virutal disk layout ( Fusion , Drobo raid , synology raid , G-tech raid , etc. ) then the "back-up" is another copy somewhere else.




You probably want to put some "extra" money into a battery backed UPS for that storage. All of these boxes Drobo, Synology , etc. typically don't behave well if suddenly cut power. They may have internal battery to keep the RAID 5 metadata consistent but a far more safe state is shutdown and off if there is no power ( and don't have to be up 24/7/365).

Can have a UPS system set up to just do a shutdown if the power is off for XX minutes then trigger a clean shutdown. (where XX is substantially smaller than the UPS's battery time).

Frankly I suspect much of the drama folks had with Drobo systems was corruption cause from external factors as much as the Drobo internals. Those factors don't change much if just swap out the Drobo.

Thanks for the info as always it's been most helpful. :D
 

ECUpirate44

macrumors 603
Mar 22, 2010
5,750
8
NC
Is there a baseline Synology product that will allow me to access my files from any network not just my LAN?
 

deconstruct60

macrumors G5
Mar 10, 2009
12,219
3,821
Is there a baseline Synology product that will allow me to access my files from any network not just my LAN?

The lower end products have caps on cloud station clients but it is pretty much avaialble for all the products that run the lastest version of their DSM software.

http://www.synology.com/dsm/home_file_sharing_cloud_station.php

Should consider though the hole will have to poke through firewall to enable this. It can be secured but it weakly secured it is an opening.
 
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