51–60 of 209 posts
It continues to surprise me why Backblaze still trades at a fraction of its peak COVID share price. A well-managed company with solid fundamentals, strong IP and growing.
For my new NVR, the POE power supply is separated out to a powered switch, the newer CPU can do hardware video encoding, and I used SSD for first stage writing and hard disks as secondary backup. The heat has gone way down. So far things have run well. I know constant rewriting on SSD is bad, but the MTBF of SSD indicates it will be a number of years before failing. It’s an acceptable risk.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
RAID doesn't cover all of the scenarios as offsite backup, such as massive electrical power surge, fire, flood, theft or other things causing total destruction of the RAID array. Ideally you'd want a setup that has local storage redundancy in some form of RAID and offsite backup.
In fact for home users backup is WAY more important than RAID, because your NAS down for a (restore time) is not that important, but data loss is forever.
Based on the data, it seems they have 4.4 petabytes of storage under management. Neat. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1E4MS84SbSwWILVPAgeIi...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In fact for home users backup is WAY more important than RAID, because your NAS down for a (restore time) is not that important, but data loss is forever.
For essential personal data you're right, but a very common use case for a home NAS is a media server. The library is usually non-essential data - annoying to lose, but not critical. Combined with its large size, it's usually hard to justify a full offsite backup. RAID offers a cost-effective way to give it some protection, when the alternative is nothing
The amount of personally generated sensitive data that doesn't fit on a laptop's onboard storage (which should all be backed up offsite as well) will usually fit on like a 12TB RAID-1 pair, which is easier to back up than 40TB+ of movies.
After couple failed hard disks in my old NVR, I’ve come to realize heat is the biggest enemy of hard disks. The NVR had to provide power to the POE cameras, ran video transcoding, and constantly writing to the disk. It generated a lot of heat. The disks were probably warped due to the heat and the disk heads crashed onto the surface, causing data loss. For my new NVR, the POE power supply is separated out to a powere…
But equipment designers keep trying to stuff things into spaces that are too small and use inadequate ventilation.
It's not a best practice, but the last 10 years I've run my home server with a smaller faster drive for the OS and a single larger disk for bulk storage that I choose using Backblaze Drive Stats. None of have failed yet (fingers-crossed). I really trust their methodology and it's an extremely valuable resource for me as a consumer. My most recent drive is a WDC WUH722222ALE6L4 22TiB, and looking at the stats (albeit…
No RAID 0 for the bulk storage? What’s your disaster plan?
It's not a best practice, but the last 10 years I've run my home server with a smaller faster drive for the OS and a single larger disk for bulk storage that I choose using Backblaze Drive Stats. None of have failed yet (fingers-crossed). I really trust their methodology and it's an extremely valuable resource for me as a consumer. My most recent drive is a WDC WUH722222ALE6L4 22TiB, and looking at the stats (albeit…
Careful... that is 22 TB, not 22 TiB. Disk marketing still uses base 10. TiB is base 2.
22 TB = 20 TiB
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sure you're aware but consider putting another drive in for some flavor of RAID, it's a lot easier to rebuild a RAID than to rebuild data usually! Edit: By "some flavor" I mean hardware or software.
RAID doesn't cover all of the scenarios as offsite backup, such as massive electrical power surge, fire, flood, theft or other things causing total destruction of the RAID array. Ideally you'd want a setup that has local storage redundancy in some form of RAID and offsite backup.
If I have 3 disks to devote to backup, I'd rather have 1 local copy and two remote copies, vs 1 local copy with RAID and 1 remote copy without.
I had five Seagates fail in my Synology NAS in less than a year. Somebody suggested it was a "bad" firmware on that model, but I switched to WD and haven't had a single failure since.
Did you purchase them all at the same time from the same store? I've had a batch of SSDs fail from the same vendor / mfg timeframe. I started ordering a couple here and there form different vendors where possible. So far i've been lucky to get drives that aren't from the same batches. I tend to buy Exos from seagate and WD gold though so there's a bit of a premium tacked on.