External Hard Drives - to save my LO and other content

users
#1

Hi Remy,

Your posts are so appreciated.

I'm in the USA so I'm not sure how 500-600 CAD$, 675-1000 CAD$ translates into
American dollars?

Is it easier to detect which NAS drives are Red
than trying to ascertain that with WD?

Thank you so much,

Charles.

users@global.libreoffice.org>
other content

Hi,

Hard drives will die (even SSDs). While MTBF indicates long periods of
time, some will still experience drive failures with corresponding loss
of data (been there, done that). If you want to use something external
to store your data while still having very low probability of data
loss, I would recommend buying a NAS. Most of these units will have
multiple disks used to ensure the loss of one hard disk will not
negatively affect you. Get a two-bay unit operated in RAID 1 at a
minimum; this means you can loose one disk and keep on going until you
replace the faulty disk. Units with more bays will provide additional
levels of protection, but at a higher initial investment (ASUSTOR 2-bay
units go for about 500-600 CAD$, 675-1000 CAD$ for 4-bay plus hard
disks - my IT buddy would probably tell you to go for WD Red)

#2

Hi,

Thank you for your appreciation. You are very kind.
1 USD is worth about 1.25 CAD. However, US buyers usually have access
to overall cheaper prices. You can look on TigerDirect.com or
BestBuy.com as a starting point and see what's available there (TD had
272 units before I wrote this message). A good startup article could
also be this one if you are not familiar with NAS devices: https://www.
pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2401086,00.asp, and then this: https://www.as
ustor.com/service/nas_selector (at least to get the specs of what you
need).

When I spoke of WD Red, it was in the context of getting a diskless
unit for which you buy the amount of storage you need (for example, I
bought 4x3TB that I run in RAID 5 which gives an effective 8TB of
storage separate from the unit). I honestly would not know how to
detect if a box has WD Reds in it or not, unless by opening it.

For the longest while, I had a two disk (2x 2TB) Iomega unit that
served me very well (an equivalent unit would probably be the WD - My
Cloud EX2 Ultra 4TB 2-Bay External Network Storage or Synology -
DiskStation 2-bay External Network Storage). As the number of users and
usage grew, it became a bit under-powered so I had to upgrade, but I
would recommend something like that for a single user. If you have a
lot of media files and want to stream from your NAS, then go for a unit
with a larger processor (quad-core with higher frequency) and ideally
expandable memory.

I hope this helps.

Rémy Gauthier.