Should I move to SSDs for backup storage?

[ddublu]

I currently have an iMac where I do all of my editing. I have all of my data backed up via CrashPlan and my main external setup is an OWC Thunderbay 4 at 16TB setup in RAID 5. I also have the same setup in a 20TB size that is a back up of the 16TB drives. I also move everything to a 1TB external drive each year and it's stored in a small and really old bank safe in my garage. My question is this...Seems like the 20tb setup is redundant (kinda the point) but should I move on from the physical drives over to something like an SSD setup in similar storage sizes?

I have had a few disks fail but SoftRaid warned me immediately and RAID 5 seems to have saved me. I want to be able to operate in silence, not have to worry about disks failing and want to take advantage of the speed increases that SSD provides. I have about 7TB used/backed up.

 

[deep diver]

Everything else being equal, SSD is always the better bet over disks.

 

[maflynn]

Everything else being equal, SSD is always the better bet over disks.

Always?

I wouldn't say always, cost is one factor, having 5TB of spinning disks for backups is a lot cheaper then SSD. If you're not that concerned about performance (and backups are one of those usages where speed is not a critical factor), then Hds could make more sense.

 

[ddublu]

Always?

I wouldn't say always, cost is one factor, having 5TB of spinning disks for backups is a lot cheaper then SSD. If you're not that concerned about performance (and backups are one of those usages where speed is not a critical factor), then Hds could make more sense.

Would I still want to (or can I even) setup RAID on SSDs? So if I am getting an 8TB array, my actual disk space would be a bit less.

 

[deep diver]

Always?

I wouldn't say always, cost is one factor, having 5TB of spinning disks for backups is a lot cheaper then SSD. If you're not that concerned about performance (and backups are one of those usages where speed is not a critical factor), then Hds could make more sense.

I don't disagree. "Everything else being equal" includes affordability which is not the same for everyone.

 

[AlaskaMoose]

Always?

I wouldn't say always, cost is one factor, having 5TB of spinning disks for backups is a lot cheaper then SSD. If you're not that concerned about performance (and backups are one of those usages where speed is not a critical factor), then Hds could make more sense.

I agree with you about that. For example, I have a USB-3 docking station that has a port for connecting SATA har drives, plus several 2-3 TB hard drives that don't have enclosures. I connect the docking station to the iMac, grab one of the numerous SATA drives, plug it to the docking station, and save my photos to it. An SSD drive is fine because the shorter time it takes to save a photo to it, but SATA hard drives are quite cheap, and most are fast enough.

Something else: I prefer hard drives that aren't too large, somewhere around 2-3TB in size. I prefer the smaller sizes because I don't want to store all the photos in one hard drive, regardless is it is SSD or not.

 

[NathanCH]

If you can afford it, there are few reasons to stick with mechanical drives.

In a vacuum, HDD are said to be very reliable. However, in practice, people move around and the HDD is subject to all sorts of things that could damage it.

Had too many break on me. I have redundancy but it's a hassle.

 

[ChrisA]

If you backup budget is fixed you can have more reliabilty with mechanical spining drives. Why? Because for the samw peeice you can have more HDDs.

Let's say you have $250 to spend. You can buy two 1TB SSDs or about four Disk drives. Having you data copied to four drives is safer then copied to two drives.

That said you have to look atthe common causes of data loss. The #1 case is operator error. You deleted afile that you did not mean to delete and did not discover the mistake for some months or even years. The next case is los of the equipment to teft or fire or some kind of electrical power surge. In all these case having more drives in your RAID setup does you no good, When lightening strikesthe utilty pole near your house the computer and all the data on all the drivesthat are connected could all be lost.

Hard drives are beter for Time Machine backups if you have a budget. Tme machine will keep data untill drive is filled and having a larger drive means that data is retained longer.

If noise is an issue, place the storge server in a closet in a different room

 

[kenoh]

Also remember with an SSD it is a binary failure. When it fails, it fails entirely and often without warning. We have these issues daily at work because of the number of them we use.

With spinning platters, they usually start with bad sectors that increase in frequency and volume so more of a warning giving you a chance to prepare for maintenance actions.

Have you considered using a service like Amazon Glacier to back your storage server off to? I have 2 Synology NAS devices that back up to Glacier. It costs about 0.4p per GB per month.

You can put in SSDs as they are indeed faster but if you network connection is not 10gbps then the bottleneck just moves to the next slowest link in the chain.

Can you put the storage server out the way somewhere or look at quieter fans and quieter disks? I find the Seagate Ironwolfs are a lot quieter than the western digital drives.

 

[kenoh]

Would I still want to (or can I even) setup RAID on SSDs? So if I am getting an 8TB array, my actual disk space would be a bit less.

Yes Raid is at the controller level not the disk itself and the usual capacity “penalty” of your chosen fault tolerance setup applies too.

The thing about the disks in the safe, you need to get them out once in a while and check that they haven’t seized up or fallen foul to other environmental concerns.

 

[tcphoto1]

Why replace a drive if it's functioning? I have pairs of matching drives for redundancy, one pair next to the computer and the others stay in a fire resistant safe. It's not like it takes forever to backup on a HDD but speed costs money. I just added a pair of GTechnology 1TB mobile drives at $70 each and I'm comfortable with the cost/functionality/speed of my system.

 

[ddublu]

Resurfacing this thread.....another reason I was considering a move to SSD is that I now have a new, pretty loaded iMac and when launching things like LR and Final Cut, it's taking upwards of 5-10 secs for the arrays to spin up before opening. Trying eliminate that as well. My iMac is a 3.8 8-core I7 with 64mb DDR4, 1TB SSD and Radeon 5500 XT 8gb.

 

[Clix Pix]

I use SSDs for my current backups and what I call "supplementary files" storage, plus older platter/spinner drives for archival storage. I much prefer using SSDs for their speediness. Their small physical size makes them ideal as traveling companions and also for storage in my bank safe deposit box. Once a month I run backups and swap out the SSDs that are in the bank with freshly-backed-up SSDs. Eventually when 4 TB external SSDs become more readily available I will get a couple of those, too, and shift some of my archival files to them, get them off the older drives.

I have backups of my backups -- I'm a firm believer in redundancy in this situation and so if one SSD happens to fail on me, not a huge issue, as the material on it is also available on one or more other SSDs.

One reason I use the "supplementary files" system is to get some things off my internal drive, as, yes, speediness and responsiveness can be affected when a drive is nearly full to capacity. I shoot a lot of photographs so it is especially important to keep most of those files off the internal drive once I have processed them. My RAW files are quite large and there is no reason to keep them on the computer once I have processed and edited the images.

I use Samsung T5, T7 and X5 drives, plus G-Drive Mobile SSDs, and I recently picked up a SanDisk Extreme Pro External SSD. I've been using SSDs for some time now, since Samsung's first T1, gradually accumulating external SSDs as the need arose and gradually retiring older platter/spinner drives.

 

[ddublu]

Nice..I have 16TB and 20TB arrays so SSD versions of that setup is going to be up there.

 

[Clix Pix]

You must have a RAID or NAS system of some sort set up......much more than what I have needed or anticipate needing any time soon!

 

[ddublu]

My 20tb is just a backup is a backup of my 16tb and may be overkill....would love to drop to one of those and have a desktop or even portable drive to work from for my primary and keep using Crashplan for everything in the cloud. Any problems with that?

 

[Ifti]

I moved completely across to SSDs for everything a while ago now - well, almost.

I have 6 external SSD drives at the moment.

8TB OWC ThunderBlade V4 - used for Final Cut Pro current projects
8TB OWC ThunderBlade V4 - used for Final Cut Pro completed projects I may need to still refer to
4TB OWC ThunderBlade V4 - used for backing up my Documents, iTunes library, Photos etc
2TB Sandisk Extreme Pro - Used for Time Machine backups
1TB Sandisk Extreme Pro - Used for CCC Clone
2TB Glyph Atom Pro - used for moving data around if need be (although its currently sitting empty! lol)

The only physical HDDs I have are in the below:
48TB Qnap NAS (although in RAID6) - used to backup the 3 ThunderBlade drives above, as well as used by others in the family to backup their work etc. Also for Multimedia streaming across the house etc.

The above setup works well for me. Yes its probably overkilll having 25TB in external SSD form but I like the fastest possible speeds for my editing, and I to know that should anything happen to my main system I can be back up and running in the shortest timeframe possible as a restore (or booting my CCC clone drive) would be super fast.

I think SSD prices are at a decent level now - they've fallen a lot over the years.

 

[jeyf]

if using a cloud file service verify it has effective encryption all the way around. Maybe the crashPlan has that?

I have 2 raid 5 nas boxes and they backup via chronosync. A one way sync w/o compression. A pdf file dosnt compress that much. I can immediately grab the backup, w/o restore software. I schedule the back up like 2am so not worried about backup speed.

like a NAS box is for hard drives i thought there would be network based hardware box that would manage SSD's. At least by now you would think someone would have product to address this.

hard drives as a mechanical system, even if they are not powered up you have to worry about things like internal lubricant contamination. The current gaggle of hard drives, the data density is high. Even slight odd vibration could effect drive firmware re try efforts. I put my NAS boxes in the basement; out of the way of household mayhem. They have an internal web page anyway so not interested in seeing the led's blink.

 

[dimme]

I have been thinking about moving to SSD's for mu MacMini server, but two things are holding me back. The cost and from what I read SSD are not as durable as Spinning HDs when they are being constantly rewritten. Hopefully this will improve as the price comes down.

 

[OreoCookie]

I have been thinking about moving to SSD's for mu MacMini server, but two things are holding me back. The cost and from what I read SSD are not as durable as Spinning HDs when they are being constantly rewritten. Hopefully this will improve as the price comes down.

I wouldn’t worry about durability, SSDs are plenty durable.

 

[Ledgem]

Go with the usual paradigm: use SSDs for activity, and HDDs for general media storage and access. You'll stretch your money farther that way, and SSDs are really going to waste if data is just sitting on them and not being accessed.

That's my setup: SSD for active photo culling, editing, and file conversion, then shuffle the photos into a library on my Drobo (operating in RAID 5 equivalent), which is also backed up with Backblaze. If a single SSD weren't cutting it for the storage space needed, consider putting it with another SSD in a RAID.

Regarding your question over two RAIDs and Crashplan... since you've already got it, might as well use it, but otherwise the second RAID is only needlessly redundant if you couldn't afford to wait for data recovery over the internet, or if you don't trust Crashplan.

 

[jeyf]

my 2nd NAS box that I use as a backup to my 1st NAS box is 11 years old. as a backup it dosnt need to be either fast or reliable
the other day I saw a newer NAS box on craigslist. I might buy it.


I thought at this point in time SSD would have totally replaced the mechanical drives

 

[Allyance]

I followed every body's advice and got a new SanDisk 1T SSD to back up my current iMac before the new one arrives.
I was excited to try it out, but nothing I did made the disk utility recognize it. Went on line and chatted with SanDisk tech, nothing he said worked. Tried it in my Windows laptop and worked fine. Now I knew it wasn't the SSD, so I did what I always did when hardware didn't work, I rebooted. Bingo, there it was. So if anyone has the same problem, just reboot with drive connected.

 

[kenoh]

I followed every body's advice and got a new SanDisk 1T SSD to back up my current iMac before the new one arrives.
I was excited to try it out, but nothing I did made the disk utility recognize it. Went on line and chatted with SanDisk tech, nothing he said worked. Tried it in my Windows laptop and worked fine. Now I knew it wasn't the SSD, so I did what I always did when hardware didn't work, I rebooted. Bingo, there it was. So if anyone has the same problem, just reboot with drive connected.

Did you just speak heresy and suggest the Windows de facto fix all worked? 😂

Glad it worked

 

[Allyance]

Naw, just wanted to eliminate cable or defective device, hardly use laptop, bought it long before the iMac. Working fine on iMac, backed up a bunch of files last night.