Buffalo Terastation

futureal33

futureal33

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Just wondering if anyone uses these here?

Im considering getting one, fitted with 4x1TB drives in it (WD Green 5400rpm 1TB drives) and using it as my Lightroom library.

Would I be able to use it in the following way:

  • Leave Buffalo Terastation on 24/7
  • Turn PC on/off as required, while Buffalo remains on regardless
  • PC auto-reconnect to Buffalo every power-on
  • Enable mirror RAID mode so data is copied onto 2 drives

That would free up my in-PC hard drives for other files (music, jpegs, docs etc)
Any thoughts/comments?
 
thats pretty much what i do with a synology device. as it's a NAS you just map network drives to it and they will appear each boot up.

[broken record]remember even raid mirroring wont protect you from deletion, corruption and some types of hardware failure. ideally you still want a second copy of your files.[/broken record]

personally id run it in raid5 for more space and then have your 2nd copy as above.
 
Well ive already got a redundant 1TB internal drive which doesn't do much atm, so could make a duplicate import to that drive through LR when importing photos.

Ps - Ive heard RAID5 is slow write speed - which when dealing with 5DMK2 files (25+mb files) might be annoying? Especially on multiple file imports
I was considering RAID10, which would give me 2TB storage and 2TB redundancy (in a 4x1TB drive array - correct?)

One other Q
I don't want to run it as a NAS (ie, I dont want it connected to a Network) Can I just plug directly into it from my PC?
Or would an ethernet wire be faster?
 
the terastation is a NAS, doesnt look like it can be used as a DAS (USB/eSata).

to be honest my working LR files are on my RAID5 NAS over gigabit LAN and have never felt lacking in performance. raid10 is essentially raid1 but slightly faster.
 
I have a terrastation set up with 2x1 TB drives and then another NAS drive as on site back up then my 1TB USB drive for off site back up.

The Buffalos are both wireless and connection speeds are not an issue even with my LR3 files
 
I use a Buffalo NAS drive too and did use it as my sole backup until I read about a small "feature" that Buffalo uses.

As you probably know, Buffalo uses it's own filing system to store files (not FAT/FAT32 etc and it's controllers allow Windows/MACs to see the data) which was a bit of a shock to me, but didn't seem to be much of an issue.

A little later I read an article that a user had posted syaing that he had a Buffalo NAS drive and the internal power supply for the drive had failed, rendering the drive unusable. Now under normal circumstances, you would replace the power supply and you would be off and running again, but oh no. Buffalo uses proprietary power supplies and that writer couldn't get one so in essence, all of his data was now worthless as he couldn't access it.

So, what I do is use the Buffalo NAS as my main backup drive, BUT, I bought some extra drives that are more "normal" and backup all of the Buffalo to these external drives at the end of the day. This process also has the added benefit of not having all of your eggs in one basket, but I must admit to getting quite a shock when I read about the writer's problems.

To be fair to Buffalo, that was a few years back and I have not had any problems with the drive and it works just fine, but I must admit to being able to rest more easily knowing I have a backup of my backups in place.
 
One last point to add to this is that regardless of what backup you have, the important thing is where you keep the backup.
I have now seen two separate instances where businesses have kept diligent backups every ay, and kept the tapes/ backup drives in the same property and lost the lot in a fire.

It's rare, but does happen.

I'm lucky I work in IT and know the pitfalls and take my backups offsite once a month or so whilst retaining backups at home

Many people sing the praises of backing up to the cloud, personally it's not for me. I like to know where my data is, who can access it etc and regardless of how secure a provider will tell you that their data centre is, there are people out there who can get access to it, and there are staff who work for these companies that will make mistakes and make your data accessible. Julst look at sony playstation network, or the amount of data that wikileaks has!

So in short, regardless of what storage you have at home/ work, think about what happens if your premises burns, all equipment is stolen etc.

Just my 2p worth
 
Hmm... Just going through the same thought process here, but for media files on my server. Some thoughts:

  • RAID5. Whilst it provides a parity disk, it doesn't protect against "bit rot" which you may find when you try and rebuild your data should you lose a disk. If this happens, the array can't be rebuilt and you've lost your data. RAID6 has double parity but is typically only supported by fully hardware RAID systems (i.e. PCI-e cards that are ~£300 just for the cards). This starts to get expensive - not only on disks, but also controllers!!
  • RAID5 suffers from a potential problem should the power go out as you're writing to the array which could cause you to lose the array as you may lose the integrity of the array.
  • I've seen various reports of low cost green disks dropping out of RAID arrays as they start to fail (take a long time to respond if the ECC systems on disk try and correct bad blocks). Don't know how true this is though but could mean reformatting and rebuilding the array more often than you expect and hence potentially losing your data.
  • If you have a lot of data (I am looking at a 6TB datastore at the moment), mirroring can start to get expensive - especially if you also want to back up the data elsewhere. It also means you become reliant on a lot of disks quite quickly.

I was going down the RAID5 route until I looked into it but now I'm looking at converting my home server (currently running XP) to run a freeBSD variant to allow me access to a filesystem called ZFS. It has something called RAID-Z (and RAID-Z2) which is a bit like RAID 5 (and 6 in the case of -Z2) except there is extra parity information stored throughout the disks. This means that should one disk fail and you need to rebuild the array, should it find an error in the remaining disks, it knows which disk the error is on so can recover from it. Other than needing to dedicate a PC to run FreeBSD, I can't sere any downsides at the moment (you can even implement triple parity if you want!). It has some other whacky features such as being able to snapshot the drives at any time instantly enabling cohesive backups to be made. It also doesn't need to take the disks offline to check them - it's done with the pool of disks live and still serving data.

You may think I'm being paranoid as a home user, but by the end of the week, we'll be using 15+ HDDs in all the computers here. Drives do fail (I needed to replace a drive a month or two back as files started disappearing) and I had to check-disk my main server boot disk yesterday morning which took 3 or so hours. Have to say I didn't expect to be thinking of enterprise style systems just to hold my data!
 
To be honest in all the raid5 arrays we run at work that have had drives fail (quite a few disks, as a company with a lot of intensive read/writes) we've never had a problem with an array rebuilding.

Ideally if you're running a nas 24/7 then it is worth considering a ups also.

Although the worst can happen, this is why you never trust data to an array alone. I think you're over thinking it a bit andy ;)
 
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neil_g said:
To be honest in all the raid5 arrays we run at work that have had drives fail (quite a few disks, as a company with a lot of intensive read/writes) we've never had a problem with an array rebuilding.
Click to expand...
But what drives and controllers do you use? Eco Greens or RAID certified drives? Hardware controllers with battery backup or HBAs with s/w RAID?

neil_g said:
I think you're over thinking it a bit andy ;)
Click to expand...
Just writing down my thought processes ;)

I'd got to the point where I could see either a lot of cost or downsides to spreading the data across a number of disks thus reducing the MTBF. I quite like the ZFS route as it gives me more integrity for lower cost than any of the pure RAID systems (currently tossing up whether to run single or double parity drives). The key thing for me is none of this data will be backed up anywhere else. I can always recreate it, but don't want the hassle of re-ripping my entire BluRay/CD library which would just take (a long) time. I now have no BR/DVD/CD players in the house at all (other than drives in the PCs for ripping), so the alternative is just live TV whilst everyone waits for me to rebuild the library.....

Plus it's something interesting to do ;)
 
arad85 said:
But what drives and controllers do you use? Eco Greens or RAID certified drives? Hardware controllers with battery backup or HBAs with s/w RAID?

Just writing down my thought processes ;)

I'd got to the point where I could see either a lot of cost or downsides to spreading the data across a number of disks thus reducing the MTBF. I quite like the ZFS route as it gives me more integrity for lower cost than any of the pure RAID systems (currently tossing up whether to run single or double parity drives). The key thing for me is none of this data will be backed up anywhere else. I can always recreate it, but don't want the hassle of re-ripping my entire BluRay/CD library which would just take (a long) time. I now have no BR/DVD/CD players in the house at all (other than drives in the PCs for ripping), so the alternative is just live TV whilst everyone waits for me to rebuild the library.....

Plus it's something interesting to do ;)
Click to expand...

These days a fibre channel HP E-V-A (hyphenated due to swear/text filter) SAN and their supplied/certified drives but even going back a few years to standard Dell PERC controllers and standard scsi-320's.

That said even though we run raid5 on the arrays the disks themselves are backed up to a second array and then off to tape. If you're worrying about array failure then you have to consider nothing is full proof be it pure raid or the pseudo raid the potential is one day the storage solution will fail therefore you should have a backup. Like I've said on here before I've had PERC controllers fail and write garbage all over each attached drive before.

Regarding drives in end user / smb storage arrays, follow the array manufacturers compatible drive list to the letter. They will have done more hours testing with these drives than the likes of you and me would ever need or worry about :)
 
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The problem with the cheaper drives (i.e. read what you or I buy for home) now is they have disabled the features that make them reliable to RAID controllers. That's the problem - running RAID "reliably" costs a bit of money AND you need a good backup strategy.

As I said, I don't mind if the array does fail, it'll just be a pain in the rear to recreate the array. I have everything here to do it, just I'd like to have the safest possible solution for the least amount of money (or more correctly - read: I want the best chance of recovery given a particular cost). To do this "properly", I was looking at £600+ for a RAID controller plus disks plus backup storage - not cheap.
 
arad85 said:
The problem with the cheaper drives (i.e. read what you or I buy for home) now is they have disabled the features that make them reliable to RAID controllers. That's the problem - running RAID "reliably" costs a bit of money AND you need a good backup strategy.
Click to expand...

Indeed, however like i say sticking to the manufacturers compatible list should see you through to a decent level of reliability. Ive been running samsungs 2tb drives in my raid5 array for 12-18 months so far. Also technically you should have a backup strategy anyway, especially so if you're already fretting about hardware issues ;)
 
Yup... If you can't afford to lose it, back it up in more than one place!
 
I had a terra station which worked ok (although a pain to get it working in the first place). But a little power cut killed it. Basically, if the power goes off and on then off and on again fairly quickly, it goes into a safe mode where no data can be accessed. I was on for a whole day trying to flash it and all sorts following the tutorials on getting it back out of safe mode.

I eventually had to crack it open and install a virtual machine and linux to access the drives file type and rescue my data. Then put the whole lot in the bin!
 
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