Multiple HDD question

[Drewberry]

I would like to setup my drives a certain way but I'm not sure if this is possible. I have family photos/videos that are irreplaceable. So I would like them mirrored on at least two drives.

However I also have a few TB of movies that I'm not to concerned about losing. I was hoping to have a third drive just for the movies with no redundancy.

Initially I bought 2x4tb drives and was going to mirror them and put all of our data on them. But we don't access the family photos/videos as much as we do the movies. So I thought the above solution might be safer. Any thoughts would be appreciated.

 

[DrKK]

Hard to give you good advice without having a better idea of how much we're talking about. Can you give us an estimate of the amount of "important" stuff you have, and an estimate of the amount of "I can lose this" stuff that you have? Also, how hard are we trying not to spend any more money if spending more money would make sense?

 

[Stux]

You should probably setup a single pool, with adequate redundancy and have a backup plan in place for your "important stuff"

RAID is not a backup.

 

[Drewberry]

Hard to give you good advice without having a better idea of how much we're talking about. Can you give us an estimate of the amount of "important" stuff you have, and an estimate of the amount of "I can lose this" stuff that you have? Also, how hard are we trying not to spend any more money if spending more money would make sense?

Right now I've got about 700GBs of important data. About 2tb of movies that I'm not concerned with losing. I'm not concerned about spending money I was hoping around $300 total for all the drives. Obviously I would like some room to grow. I was thinking 2x2tb mirrored drives for the important data and a 1x4tb for the movies. I just didn't know if that was possible.

 

[Drewberry]

You should probably setup a single pool, with adequate redundancy and have a backup plan in place for your "important stuff"

RAID is not a backup.

That was my original plan. But we don't access the "important stuff" very often. The movies that I'm not concerned with loosing gets accessed all the time. So I thought by keeping them on separate drives I could increase the life of the drives holding important data.

 

[Stux]

That was my original plan. But we don't access the "important stuff" very often. The movies that I'm not concerned with loosing gets accessed all the time. So I thought by keeping them on separate drives I could increase the life of the drives holding important data.

That sounds like a poor reason to me. Spinning up/down a drive will wear it out faster than keeping it spinning 24/7... at least in my experience. The actual periodic reading shouldn't make a difference to its longevity.

And anyway, with adequate redundancy it doesn't matter, as if you 'wear out' a drive, you just replace it.

You still need a backup

 

[Dice]

I'd suggest to proceed with your mirrored drive setup 2x4TB drives.
Setup a mirrored vdev pool and put all data there.
Once space is running out, add another pair of mirrored drives. I think that is what makes the most sense to you at the moment.

Then, for backup I'd consider getting a ~2TB USB drive to use for backup of the most important stuff. Only connect it once needed for the backup procedure.
Or, use a cloud provider... It'll probably get you about 1 or 2 years worth of storage for the same price of the 2TB USB drive. I've used dropbox premium for this occasion.

 

[Drewberry]

Thanks for the info everyone. I guess I'll proceed with my 2x4tb mirrored. I also have a 3tb external to do backups on the important data.