Storage

I was very intrigued when I found out about Storage Spaces and ReFS being introduced in Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8. But now that I’ve spent some time with it, I’m left disappointed, and I will not be trusting my precious data with either of these features, just yet. Microsoft publicly announced Storage Spaces and ReFS in early Windows 8 blog posts. Storage Spaces was of special interest to the Windows Home Server community in light of Microsoft first dropping support for Drive Extender in Windows Home Server 2011, and then completely dropping Windows Home Server, and replacing it with Windows Server 2012 Essentials. My personal interest was more geared towards expanding my home storage capacity in a cost effective and energy efficient way, without tying myself to proprietary hardware solutions. ...

In my last post I compared the performance of Synology DS1511+ against the QNAP TS-859 Pro. As I finished writing that post, Synology announced the new Synology DS2411+. Instead of using a DS1511+ and DX510 extender for 10 disks, the DS2411+ offers 12 disks in a single device. The price difference is also marginal, DS1511+ is $836, the DX510 is $500, and the DS2411+ is $1700. That is a difference of only $364, and well worth it for the extra storage space, and the reliability and stability of all drives in one enclosure. I ended up returning my DX510 and DS1511+, and got a DS2411+ instead. ...

I have been very happy with my QNAP TS-859 Pro (Amazon), but I’ve run out of space while archiving my media collection, and I needed to expand the storage capacity. You can read about my experience with the TS-859 Pro here, and my experience archiving my media collection here. My primary objective with this project is storage capacity expansion, and my secondary objective is improved performance. My choices for storage capacity expansion included: ...

I am about two thirds done archiving my entire CD, DVD, and BD collection to network storage. I have been ripping on a part time basis for about 5 months, and so far I’ve ripped over 700 discs. I have considered archiving my media collection for some time, but just never got around to it. Recently our toddler discovered how to open discs and use them as toys, so storing the discs safely quickly became a priority. I’d like to give you some insight into what I’ve learned and what process I follow. ...

I just received an email from ElephantDrive informing me that my legacy unlimited storage account will be terminated in 30 days, and that I must select a new plan. In July 2009 ElephantDrive announced that they are no longer offering their $100 per year unlimited storage plan. ElephantDrive is now offering a $200 per year for 500GB plan. In February 2011 Mozy announced that they are no longer offering their $55 per year unlimited storage plan. Mozy is now offering a $120 per year for 125GB plan. In February 2011 Trend Micro SafeSync announced that they are bandwidth throttling large accounts. In March 2011 they announced that they are no longer offering their $35 per year unlimited storage plan. SafeSync is now offering a $150 per year for 150GB plan. Carbonite offers a $55 per year for unlimited storage plan, but they are bandwidth throttling accounts over 35GB to 512Kbps and accounts over 200GB to 100Kbps access speeds. AVG LiveKive offers an $80 per year for unlimited storage plan, but the terms of service defines unlimited as 500GB. BackBlaze offers a $60 per year for unlimited storage plan. CrashPlan offers a $50 per year for unlimited storage plan. Neither BackBlazenor CrashPlan supports their unlimited plan on server class machines. ...

I just had one of those moments where the blood drains from your head as you contemplate what you did. I was in Disk Management Console, messing around with new drives I was testing, and I wanted to delete the volumes. Right Click, Delete, Are you sure, your data will be lost, and without thinking twice, I clicked yes. Then the blood drained from my head as I realized what I just did; instead of deleting the test volume, I just deleted my main 5TB data volume! ...

I previously wrote about my impressions of the DroboPro, and in case I was not clear, I was not impressed. I recently read the announcement of the new QNAP TS-859 Pro, and from the literature it seemed like a great device, high performance, feature rich, and power saving. The TS-859 Pro is now available, and I compared it with the DroboPro, and against a regular W2K8R2 file server. ...

In this post I am describing, and partly reviewing, my experience using a DroboPro over iSCSI. I have been aware of the Drobo storage devices for some time now, but never used one or knew anybody that owned one. Recently a coworker’s large home RAID system had a controller failure, and after recovering the data, he migrated to a DroboPro using iSCSI. After he told me how quiet the device is, and how little power it uses, I wanted to try one out myself. ...

In my previous post I talked about Western Digital RE4-GP 2TB drive problems. In this post I present my test results for 2TB drives from Seagate and Hitachi. The test setup is the same as for the RE4-GP testing, except that I only tested 4 drives from each manufacturer. Unlike the enterprise class WD RE4-GP and Hitachi Ultrastar A7K2000 drives, the Seagate Barracuda LP drive is a desktop drive. The equivalent should have been a Seagate Constellation ES drive, but as far as I know the 2TB drives are not yet available. ...

In my previous two posts I described my research into the power saving features of various enterprise class RAID controllers. In this post I detail the results of my testing of the Western Digital RE4-GP enterprise class “green” drives when used with hardware RAID controllers from Adaptec, Areca, and LSI. To summarize, the RE4-GP drive fails with a variety of problems, Adaptec, Areca, and LSI acknowledge the problem and lay blame on WD, yet WD insists there are no known problems with the RE4-GP drives. ...