Lots of storage

[ciphergoth]

If I buy one of these: and five of these:

and stick it all together using Linux software RAID, will that work as a relatively cheap (£370) 2TB RAID-5 storage array?

Will it be very noisy, and if so, should I be looking at getting one of these too so I can stick it in another room?



As you might imagine, I'm giving the whole question of backups a lot of thought at the moment...

Comments

[mskala.livejournal.com]

I run RAID1 across two drives. It's actually on top of the partitioning - I have both drives partitioned the same, and each pair of corresponding partitions is RAIDed. One pair is RAID0; I use that for large temporary files from video editing.

Although people say "it's not for backup", that's really a big part of what I use it for. I'm more worried about losing data to drive failure than my own mistakes, and having it mirrored across the two drives means I lose almost nothing (instead of "back to the last backup") when a drive fails. So far I've lost one, and was up and running again just a few hours later with no real data loss. I couldn't really make backups at that frequency.

[topbit.livejournal.com]

My home dev-server has a couple of drives softraid-ed and then with LVM on top.

Because it's mostly about web-scripts being edited, I've also got a cron job running 'rsnapshot' (for rsync diffs).

[skx.livejournal.com]

rsnapshot rocks for remote backups.

I've got a server sitting on my floor which takes complete backups of a couple of remote machines and it has saved me more than once.

(Too often I've had backups which exluded too much, so I lost files, nowadays I remotely backup "/" ignoring only /proc, /sys, and /dev. I haven't lost a file I cared about for a couple of years now :)