Advice on improving my archive solution

Storage & Archiving

Advice on improving my archive solution

Posted by Luke Ogden on August 17, 2016 at 4:23 pm

Hi folks,

I’m looking for a little advice on how to improve my hard drive-based archive system, and make it a little more robust and (if possible) simpler.

At present, when a project is finished and consolidated I power up a cheap StarTech Dual SATA Hard Drive Enclosure insert two drives that have been created as a RAID 0 pair and move project over. The two ‘slices’ are then ejected and kept in separate geographical locations for security.

The enclosure has RAID 0, 1 and Concatenation functionality but I just set it’s switch to ‘normal’ (JBOD?) and create the RAID 0 pairs with Disk Utility.

Recent problems such as changes to Disk Utility in OSX 10.11 (namely the removal of RAID tab) and one of the RAID pairs failing on me have caused me to think again about the archive system.

Is there a better way to do this kind of archiving? Would I be better using the Hardware RAID functionality of the enclosure? Any tips on recovering the aforementioned failed pair?

Thanks

Luke

27″ iMac 3.4 GHz Intel Core i7, 16GB 1333 MHz DDR3, OS X 10.9.1 //
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Luke Ogden replied 9 years, 8 months ago 2 Members · 5 Replies
5 Replies

Neil Sadwelkar
August 20, 2016 at 11:23 am

[Luke Ogden] “a cheap StarTech Dual SATA Hard Drive Enclosure “

The link is incorrect. The correct one is…
https://www.startech.com/uk/HDD/Enclosures/Dual-35in-USB-3-Hot-Swap-Trayless-SATA-Hard-Drive-Enclosure-with-Fan~SAT3520U3R

Your method is not safe. Setting the drives as JBOD and copying to both simultaneously using a copy utility like Hedge, or copying to one and using Chronosync to sync the other is safer.

———————————–
Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
twitter: fcpguru
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India
Luke Ogden
August 22, 2016 at 1:26 pm

Thanks for the input Neil, I had a feeling I wasn’t doing it right. Although doesn’t the G-tech G-Dock ev do the same thing?
anyways food for thought.

27″ iMac 3.4 GHz Intel Core i7, 16GB 1333 MHz DDR3, OS X 10.9.1 //
Adobe CC Suite
Neil Sadwelkar
August 23, 2016 at 10:44 am

The G-dock is a dock that accepts only G-Tech G-Drive ev drives. these are internally 1.5″ drives of 500 GB or 1 TB capacity. So not as fast as 3.5″ drives. The dock that you linked to (of which I too have several) accepts bare SATA drives which can be even 8Tb each. Of course, bare SATA drives aren’t as robust as encased G-Drive ev drives.

———————————–
Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
twitter: fcpguru
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India
Luke Ogden
August 23, 2016 at 10:56 am

Thanks, I guess I was just trying to emulate the concept of the G-dock with cheaper hardware. Like the StarTech the G-dock also appears to have some kind of hardware RAID 0 capability but I think your right it would be better to do this redundancy with software.

My plan is to reformat my all my RAID’d disk to JBOD like you suggest. Prefixing one ‘Master’ and one ‘Slave’ will allow me to archive everything to the master and then have Chronosync keep the slave sync’d up.

27″ iMac 3.4 GHz Intel Core i7, 16GB 1333 MHz DDR3, OS X 10.9.1 //
Adobe CC Suite
Luke Ogden
September 8, 2016 at 1:24 pm

I’m working with the trail of Chronosync to get my backup hard drive pairs synced. So far the software seems intuitive.

Can anyone shed any light on why my old workflow was was “unreliable” or “incomplete”, I’d like to be able to understand why.

Best
Luke

27″ iMac 3.4 GHz Intel Core i7, 16GB 1333 MHz DDR3, OS X 10.9.1 //
Adobe CC Suite

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