Massive Storage for Home User HELP!

[sammyman]

I need help with my storage situation. We want to buy a new iMac but I don't think the 2TB hard drive is enough for what I need! My wife is a photographer with a fast growing library of pictures because she takes about 30 weddings a year.

Photos: 1TB existing + 500Gb / year
iTunes: 200GB
Home Movies: 250GB
Movies: 1TB (no more DVD's in my house)
Apps + OSX: 100GB

For storage backup we have 8TB in a NAS in RAID 5. I can't have anything too important on here though. I guess we can get an external 2TB drive for the meantime, but then I will have to upgrade in a year or so....

So either I buy a Mac Pro instead (which would be nice to have cheap SSD), or I can wait for the next revision of iMacs and hope they increase internal hard drives. Or I need to figure out a better way to solve my growing digital needs!

What can you recommend?

 

[dissolve]

Going external is really your only option if you stick with an iMac. But if the 500GB/year turns out to be accurate, you're going to eclipse the growing capacity of hard drives very quickly. Like you said, upgrades will be needed and you'll have to resort to daisy chaining or external RAID solutions.

I think your choices are:

1) get a Mac Pro instead of iMac
2) continuously buy external drives as you fill up
3) offload some of your least-used content to optical/HDD storage

The third option is there primarily because you're going to run out of backup space soon. If you don't need all of your data live all the time, offloading to other storage methods is a good compromise. You'll still have to come up with a backup solution for them, but the risk of failure in an unused drive is much lower (obviously). Plus, you can reduce the need of active external drives attached to an iMac or free up bays in a Mac Pro.

For now, the best you can do is buy the largest drives possible. 3TB HDDs just hit the market so it's possible the next iMac will have that option.

 

[sammyman]

Going external is really your only option if you stick with an iMac. But if the 500GB/year turns out to be accurate, you're going to eclipse the growing capacity of hard drives very quickly. Like you said, upgrades will be needed and you'll have to resort to daisy chaining or external RAID solutions.

I think your choices are:

1) get a Mac Pro instead of iMac
2) continuously buy external drives as you fill up
3) offload some of your least-used content to optical/HDD storage

The third option is there primarily because you're going to run out of backup space soon. If you don't need all of your data live all the time, offloading to other storage methods is a good compromise. You'll still have to come up with a backup solution for them, but the risk of failure in an unused drive is much lower (obviously). Plus, you can reduce the need of active external drives attached to an iMac or free up bays in a Mac Pro.

For now, the best you can do is buy the largest drives possible. 3TB HDDs just hit the market so it's possible the next iMac will have that option.

I think you are right about the 3 options...

1) get a Mac Pro instead of iMac - Yes, may have to cave in here.

2) continuously buy external drives as you fill up - Annoying and expensive!

3) offload some of your least-used content to optical/HDD storag - Yeah, maybe I could wind up some older external HDD's and offload it after a couple years. Not ideal, but that could work.

Thanks for the suggestions. I wish there was an easy magic solution, but there isn't.

 

[UmbraClaw]

I'm not sure I understand your reluctance regarding keeping anything important on the NAS? If you RAID 5, then even with a HDD malfunction, your data should be safe?

But if you're too worried about a NAS solution, or want better expandability, then build your own server. Find a motherboard with 10+ SATA ports, and a tower cabinet with 10+ HDD bays, and you'll be relatively golden, especially since you can add more drives if and when you need them...

 

[sammyman]

I'm not sure I understand your reluctance regarding keeping anything important on the NAS? If you RAID 5, then even with a HDD malfunction, your data should be safe?

But if you're too worried about a NAS solution, or want better expandability, then build your own server. Find a motherboard with 10+ SATA ports, and a tower cabinet with 10+ HDD bays, and you'll be relatively golden, especially since you can add more drives if and when you need them...

I am concerned because I am currently trying to recover data from my Synology Ds410 which crashed. It is a nightmare.

 

[sammyman]

Delete

 

[dissolve]

I'm not sure I understand your reluctance regarding keeping anything important on the NAS? If you RAID 5, then even with a HDD malfunction, your data should be safe?

But if you're too worried about a NAS solution, or want better expandability, then build your own server. Find a motherboard with 10+ SATA ports, and a tower cabinet with 10+ HDD bays, and you'll be relatively golden, especially since you can add more drives if and when you need them...

You could do something like this and keep each drive redundant with RAID 1 or some other backup solution. That's a pretty good solution if you want to keep all of your data live. Try comparing NAS RAID enclosures to a simple server setup to determine which would suit you the best. The server will have much more expandability, but may be a bit more difficult to set up, depending on your experience. This is certainly going to be a more common problem as we continue to store everything digitally.

 

[UmbraClaw]

An alternative to costly HDD redundancy, could be to subscribe to an online backup solution, which could be setup to keep copies of all your files on all the HDDs in your server solution, that way it'll only cost you 50$ per year, rather than 500+ in extra HDDs for RAID 1 redundancy... Plus you'll most likely save something on the electricity bill as well...
You just have to be aware that the initial online backup of your files could take a while, depending on your upload speed, but since it would be a server solution, it'd just be churning away until it'd uploaded everything...

 

[RHVC59]

I love my Drobo FS. Five drive bays that are hot swappable and the system can be set so that your data is safe, even if two drives die. When you need to expand the amount of storage, just feed it a new disk.