expired Posted by silentalarm • Oct 29, 2020
Oct 29, 2020 5:15 AM
Item 1 of 1
expired Posted by silentalarm • Oct 29, 2020
Oct 29, 2020 5:15 AM
14TB WD Easystore External USB 3.0 Hard Drive
+ Free Store Pickup$190
$310
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Extended returns in effect if you're on the fence.
Purchases made October 13, 2020 through January 2, 2021 have an extended return period through January 16, 2021
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Regardless of where you store your data its a good idea to practice the 3-2-1 backup strategy for important data.
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(1) At first I bought a PC case [newegg.com] with 8 internal HDD bays. Thought that would last me for a while.
(2) Then I outgrew the PC case so I bought a RSV-L4500 [newegg.com] off Amazon for about $100. To utilize the extra internal drive bays I also bought an LSI HBA pre-flashed to IT mode along with two SAS-to-4xSATA cables. So with this HBA card added to your motherboard you get plug-and-play support for 8 more internal drives.
(3) Then I outgrew the RSV-L4500 (and I got tired of doing 3.3v mods to workaround power issues) so I bought a Netapp DS4246 [ebay.com] disk shelf that supports up to 24 hot-swap drives. I also needed to swap my HBA card for one that includes an external [ebay.com] SAS port to connect to the disk shelf. Then you need a special cable [amazon.com] to connect the disk shelf to the HBA. But again, everything is "plug and play". Note that the disk shelf is not quiet... it came with two redundant 580w power supplies, and it's built for datacenter use so the fans are beefy.
That might be more info than you're looking for, but my point here is that I wish I skipped the RSV-L4500 step and just went straight to the disk shelf. It's so convenient being able to pop a hard drive into the shelf, and not worry about power supply issues or anything like that.
Finally, I use Stablebit Drivepool [stablebit.com] to pool all of my disks into a single "drive". Makes organizing for Plex a breeze. I also enable file duplication on my pool, so I can lose any one disk and have that data automatically migrated and re-duplicated throughout the existing disk pool. Along with their Stablebit Scanner tool, all of my drives are fully scanned once every 30 days, and if it detects an issue it will even email you and start migrating data off the defective drive. It's not an efficient use of space; you can do better with RAID since you only need 1 or 2 disks for parity depending on how you set it up. But I like the simplicity of my setup and I don't mind having to have the extra storage space. I'm sure others feel differently.
Hope this helps. Good luck!
Odd that they are built 2 days apart but different ends!
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