MP 7,1 So what are your thoughts on the Promise Pegasus R4i?

[SDAVE]

Yeah, that is the better option if you're only serving a single machine, but the NAS does have its advantages in terms of more robust data protection etc, not to mention network availability.

I'm just surprised iSCSI doesn't get more attention, because it seems to sit in a sweet spot of the advantages of network, and local storage.

You can do hardware/software RAID with DAS

 

[reader50]

Do you realize RAID servers are used throughout the world?

You can use RAID 5 or RAID 6, even RAID 10 for more redundancy (at the cost of space loss).

On top of this, it's always recommended to have offsite backups in case there's a fire or something deadly....for that use Backblaze ($9/month unlimited instructions here) or daily/weekly offsite backups on a storage of your choice.

I use RAID myself for backups, to get large enough volumes. That doesn't address a box failure - if the NAS fails and destroys the drives inside, you've lost both primary and backups. Even if using RAID-5 (like I do), if a drive fails, followed by a 2nd drive failure during the rebuild, you have lost all data.

Hence why I don't use my NAS for backups, and the files being backed up.

I've long heard good things about Backblaze, but my ISP upload speed isn't good enough. A common problem in the US, where we lack meaningful ISP competition and enjoy the resulting high prices.

If your upload speed is good enough for your data size, excellent. I still wouldn't put primary and backup data in the same place. Not even the same cloud service. Even a data center can burn down - Iran hit at least one Amazon data center in the middle east recently. Amazon estimates months to fully repair everything, and I don't know if all data will be recovered.

 

[mattspace]

You can do hardware/software RAID with DAS

I was more thinking about stuff Synology etc. does like read-only snapshots, bitrot protection etc, I wasn't aware if that level of data management is an option for macOS RAID solutions.

iSCSI seems like the intersection of the advantages of local stuff, with the more abstracted, and multi-client accessible aspects of NAS. Looking at it, it kindof appears to be more like AFP filesharing, which was far more like a local disk than an SMB share, for example.

 

[SDAVE]

I use RAID myself for backups, to get large enough volumes. That doesn't address a box failure - if the NAS fails and destroys the drives inside, you've lost both primary and backups. Even if using RAID-5 (like I do), if a drive fails, followed by a 2nd drive failure during the rebuild, you have lost all data.

Hence why I don't use my NAS for backups, and the files being backed up.

I've long heard good things about Backblaze, but my ISP upload speed isn't good enough. A common problem in the US, where we lack meaningful ISP competition and enjoy the resulting high prices.

If your upload speed is good enough for your data size, excellent. I still wouldn't put primary and backup data in the same place. Not even the same cloud service. Even a data center can burn down - Iran hit at least one Amazon data center in the middle east recently. Amazon estimates months to fully repair everything, and I don't know if all data will be recovered.

I'm aware how RAID works lol

But most people in tech that you will talk to will tell you to always have at least 2 backups. One onsite and one offsite (in case of fires, or disasters).

If you truly want safest NAS/server setup you can do RAID 10. Even RAID 6 is very powerful (2 failure points) over RAID 5.