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Tell me about your HDDs (managing lots of data)

BladeR

New Member
Over the years, quite a few files accumulate. A lot of talk about storing a few TBs worth of sample libraries on SSDs, but I'm trying to come up with a plan for all of the other stuff that piles up. Stems, thousands of unused guitar takes, SFX libraries, RoughCuts17-24, PicLocks01-06, RARs, etc. Right now, I have 30TB hooked up to my system and it's at about 85% capacity. I've run out of USB ports to connect 8TB external drives to, so thinking it's time to come up with a better system. I long ago gave up hope of having any thorough local backups (praise be to Backblaze) and I could spend a lifetime culling through what's needed and what isn't.

So how do you people deal with all this stuff? A NAS system seems like overkill - it's all local to one machine - but that also seems like the most reliable way to hook up a bunch of drives in one place. RAID or JBOD? I could also probably start moving some things into cold storage, but then lose the protection from Backblaze (drives have to be connected every 30 days or they get deleted).

Any advice?
 
You don't typically see large enclosures that aren't also a NAS so that's really the most logical choice even if you only need it on a single computer. Many have a higher-than-gigabit-speed port for you to connect a computer directly. I'd suggest raid 5 or 6 if you want the extra redundancy.
 
A NAS is certainly a viable option. They are pretty plug and play so you don't have a lot of mess to deal with to get it up and running which is the nice thing. Alternately, you can always opt for something like a SuperChassis rack that holds 24 drives which are hotswapable. The downside is you have to get it working yourself with it's OS software and such which can be a time consuming task.
 
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