I am toying with the idea of putting together a RAID server to provide redundancy for the couple hundred Gb of video I have of my family. (It just keeps growing and at this size there isn't a simple backup strategy).

I am hoping that I can put together something with off-the-shelf hardware and a little know-how.

I think I would need about 1Tb of net storage for now, taking growth into account. I would like to have the data mirrored 100% so that the failure of one drive would leave a complete copy of the data on another drive.

What will I need to do this? What should my budget be? What will I need to learn to be able to complete this myself?

TIA.

Simplest way it to run them on Windows server 2003 and enable mirroring. Also; some cheap IDE cards now have RAID on them, it is simply a BIOS setting...

For almost 1Tb RAID you'll need at least 6 drives (2*3 300Gb drives).

If you check Newegg for "raid" you'll find a bunch of cards to get you started...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...scription=RAID

Thanks ScottC.

A little more detail: I envision this being a stand-alone box, as my desktop (Mac G5) is full at two drives. I imagine that I'll need an enclosure, the six drives you mention, a RAID controller and a network card? Any idea what that might cost, and if I can do it myself with some kind of "Dummies" book?

There are different levels of RAID, some are more for data security/stability, some are more for speed. To be honest, it's a discussion that's a little beyond the Travel Technology forum IMO. You can definitely do it yourself, but you'll need to do a fair bit of reading. Google is definitely your friend on this.

If data security (from a redundancy standpoint, not a snooping standpoint) is not a big concern, you'd probably be better off just buying one of the pre-build NAS (network attached storage) units that are now being sold. It'll likely be cheaper and considerably easier.

There are some newer 'consumer' oriented Serial-ATA (SATA) external enclosures that will hold 2-8 drives. SATA would be the better way to go today. Don't mess with PATA (parallel-IDE) drives. SATA drives are just as cheap as their IDE brethren. You can then buy the size drives you want and install in the enclosures, configure for RAID (mirror), and you should be set.

If your MOBO (G5) doesn't support SATA drives, then you can buy an SATA add-in card - most all support some level of RAID. (Does the G5 support PCI cards? I think it does.). I'm not a Mac guy. However, if you decide to put together another server box - running Windows Server 2003, any new, decent MOBO will support SATA drives and the BIOS will support RAID configurations. Checkout the following link for ideas....

http://www.provantage.com/buy-73war0...c-shopping.htm

redjr...

I'd just buy a standalone box already built, unless you're in it for the "learning experience".

You can actually buy a box from LaCie that acts like a humongous (1, 1.2 or 2TB) single external disk (plug it into your G5 with FireWire 800), but since it's a striped array inside the box, that's probably not a good idea (even though presumably they've hardened this pretty well in order to sell it). One thing I was told over and over by cautious types when I was thinking of doing some RAID at work is that you don't trust critical data to a striped array. So I'll repeat that here and let any less cautious types refute it if they like.

You mentioned network, but unless you're going to be accessing the files often from several other computers in the house, I'm not sure that's necessary. You can buy a box as network attached storage (NAS) which will have a built-in file server and such, but why? You can also attach a box to the G5 via FireWire 800, and the access to it from the G5 will be much faster. And you'll still be able to share that drive over your network with anything else using the built-in file sharing of the Mac OS.

So I'm thinking you want a flexible external RAID box, something like this http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10600 It's only one example; there are other manufacturers you can choose and maybe spend less, not sure. I'm just singling out LaCie as an example, plus I have experience using their smaller external drives. A 1TB config in that box costs $1499.

I guess the do-it-yourself route might also be an exercise in cost savings, but since this is backup, professionally configured might be the way to go. I know it's the way I'd go.

Since you are machead why not get one of these:

http://www.apple.com/xserve/raid/

I absolutely agree with CrazyOne. DO NOT use a stripped RAID array for your invaluable home videos, if it's the only archive you have. Period! Do not be tempted. In this case you are NOT after performance, but security and a backup mechanism of your priceless video collection.

I foolishly wanted to 'try-out' a stripped array a couple of years ago, and lost a boat load of family digital photos along with a host of other stuff. It was a stupid move on my part to begin with. Now I use a small (40gig) portable drive for staging all digital photos coming from my cameras. They are then copied to a master HD, where they are backed up weekly to a larger external (offline) USB 2.0 drive. At the end of the month the photo folder is archived to dual-layer DVD.

redjr....

Since you're not talking about dynamically changing data, but about static (albeit very large) files, I take issue with your original statement about there not being a simple backup strategy. There is. Get twice the storage you need, which you'd have to do for RAID Level 1 anyhow, and make copies of everything. If you don't want to buy another humongous disk drive, burn DVDs instead.

Depending on the kind of files these videos are, you might be able to save some space by compressing. It would probably take too long to decompress on a regular basis when you wanted to watch one, but for backup copies, why not? They're insurance, not for regular use. You probably won't ever need them.

It's not as sexy as RAID, but it's simpler and probably cheaper.

The easiest thing to do is to get a couple of external hard drives ( like this one ) and attach them to your machine. Copy the videos over by year. If your main drive fails, you should have no problems with the backup. If you're really worried, once you copy the videos, you can detach the drives and store them in another location. 1tb should cost about $500.

If money is no object, there's a usb/firewire 1tb lacie drive that runs $800

Just read the whole thread, and agree completely with Crazyone

RAID also gets funky if a drive fails or the card fails...

To replace them you have to make sure you have HDs that are bigger than the ones in the array and having a backup RAID controller sitting in a box on the shelf is not a bad idea (exac same model is the working card).

Since you are not booting this drive, this issue may not be as critical, but it is something to think about.

It's not a matter of the cautious types: if you lose a spindle in a striped (RAID-0) configuration, you lose the overlaid filesystem. Period.

A brief primer for all who might be interested (spindle, in this case, represents one harddrive):

Let me begin by saying that you could look at your RAID-level choices thusly: fast, cheap, reliable--pick two.

RAID-0=striped with no parity or redudency. Makes for one very large logical disk, whose read and write speeds are typically very, very fast (or, somewhat higher than a single spindle).

RAID-1=mirrored data. If you have 1 drive's worth of disk, a RAID-1 array will need to consist of two drives. Read operations on expensive RAID controllers can be faster than a single spindle (most home and desktop implementations are not). Writes are equal or slower than a single drive, especially with one disk controller (you have to commit the write to two disks).

RAID-2=stripes the data at the bit level (not the disk block level). Nobody does this anymore.

RAID-3=Byte striping with a seperate (dedicated) parity disk. Nobody does this anymore.

RAID-4=Block striping with a seperate (dedicated) parity disk. Writes are slow, reads can be fast. Nobody but Netapp does this anymore.

RAID-5=Block striping with parity and data striped across all disks in the array. Reads (particularly random ones) are fast-ish, writes can be slower than a single spindle depending upon caching and controllers. This RAID level is useful because if you blow one disk in the array, you don't lose the data--most RAID-5 arrays can operate in a "degraded" mode on array-1 disks. Most will also automatically rebuild the data/parity on the blown disk, by reading/calculating it from the remaining disks. In this sense, it's very interesting because (under certain circumstances) it's both fast and redundant.

These are the basic RAID levels. You can also do things like RAID-0+1 (a mirrored stripe), RAID 1+0 (a stripe of mirrors) and some other things. Some companies, notably EMC, have their "own" RAID implementations (EMCs is called RAID-S, where they simply have a novel way of calculating and storing parity data).

So, now that we are confused.....

For the OP: If you want a safety net, get yourself a relatively cheap RAID controller, throw two identical drives on it, and move on. Or, buy a Lacie, but make sure it's not merely striped internally (see RAID-0). If your G-V is running OS-X (or whatever animal Apple is using now), it's not entirely out of the realm that it can do a software mirror on external firewire drives (I'll leave that one alone--I'm not familiar with the "apple-ized" BSD ).

Lots of great information here. Very educational. ^

FewMiles..