NAS or MacMini+disks - MacRumors Forums

NAS or MacMini+disks - MacRumors Forums

Sep 18, 2011, 07:57 AM

#7

firestarter macrumors Demi-God Join Date: Dec 2002 Location: Green and pleasant land

I'd recommend the opposite to maflynn actually. My brother in law had a Qnap that's just died - taking some data with it (he didn't listen to me before he got it). Here's my problem with cheap RAID (especially RAID 5) solutions: - The boxes are built down to a price They often contain cheesy power supplies, tiny and noisy fans, weak processors that won't get the most out of your network bandwidth. The box itself becomes a risk factor, and can itself corrupt the disk or die. At that point you'll be left with 4 drives probably formatted in Linux EXT3, with data spread randomly across them - that you can't read on your Mac. - RAID is not backup I'm not saying that you're doing this... but people spend for a RAID solution, when really they'd be better off concentrating on backup. RAID is good to stop downtime (if a disk dies during the day, you're not spending an age restoring from backup). It isn't a backup though - since RAID units can still loose data because of accidental deletion, theft, fire, virus, OS glitch, accidental damage etc. A proper backup provides two additional copies, one of which is offsite. - RAID 5 was the right solution for a past era RAID 5 cut down on the number of disks you needed to provide a checksum of your data, and enable a rebuild. Back when disks were small and expensive, this was great - you only 'wasted' one disk for every 2+ data disks. Nowadays the funky format is just a liability - especially with 2TB drives for < $100. Personally I'd go for a Mac Mini with 4 disks. I'd share 2 disks on the network, and the other two I'd use chronosync to mirror to during the night. I'd regularly swap out these backup drives and move them offsite - and swap in alternate drives. I'd avoid RAID 5 completely, because when everything goes wrong it's good to have data that can be read by any machine. I'd use chronosync (or maybe even time machine) to do timed backups rather than mirroring, because I think that accidental deletion of a file is a more likely data-loss scenario than a disk failure, and live mirroring mirrors your mistakes just as quickly as your data. I'd use a Mac Mini, because the power of the processor is an order of magnitude higher than a cheesy Qnap. I'd use Lion, because those backup drives could be whole-disk encrypted - and that would safeguard my personal information when my backup drives are off site and in transit.

I've been debating NAS vs Mac Mini + external drives solution myself and this was the best explanation I have seen why NAS might not be the best solution. I just picked up a Mac Mini sever the other day to replace my aging Mac Pro as my 24/7 machine, so why not use the mini as the basis of my storage solution. I do have a few questions though...

1. External enclosures - following the 2 shared drive 2 back up drive model firestarter suggests would it be better to go with a stack of 4 single drive bay enclosures, a pair of dual drive bay enclosures, or a dual drive enclosure and two single drive enclosures?
2. RAID 0 - use RAID 0 on the shared network drives or just avoid RAID altogether? My gut tells me stay away from RAID 0 but I'm open to hearing arguments for or against it.
3. Chrono Sync - Would you recomend Chrono Sync on the server and Chrono Agent on the networked Mac's or Chrono Agent on the server and Chrono Sync on the networked Mac's.
4. Enclosures 2 - Which enclosures are recomemded, which to avoid