Thread: Need opinion on this purchase

My partner is a graphics designer/video editor, so she needs lots of data storage, and this is what I think is the best bang for her buck.

1 x Skymaster USB 3.0 PCI-E Card - $39.60 (includes freight and cc)
5 x 2000Gb 2TB Western Digital Caviar Green SATA-III hard disk - $104.50 (includes freight and cc)
1 x Lian Li EX-503 HDD Enclosure - $319.00 (includes cc)

I'll purchase it in a couple of hours, but if anyone has any qualms with it speak now or forever hold your piece.

Cheers for any input.

This is the other option I was concidering:


Hotway - HFR2-SU3S2
4Bay Raid System

with 4


Western Digital - WD30EZRX
3TB Drive

For

$1,081.00 all up. (plus a USB3 card)

In summary, the difference is that on paper (although may be argued) the Lian Li takes 5 HDDs but limited to 2TB, and the Hotway is a 4bay but takes 3TB hard drives.

I was thinking Raid 5.

We decided to let it go tonight, and see what you all think tonight and tomorrow (cos we cant all get on in the arvo's but a reason to procrastinate work is a good reason )

Heard the "green" drives are slower than the regular ones.

yeah but it's not to be used heavily anyway, it's purely backup.

Originally Posted by Kawolski

Heard the "green" drives are slower than the regular ones.

Yep, stay away from green drives in a chassis. Spend the few extra bucks for decent consumer grade drives at least....

I sell a few NAS units, and 90% of them go fitted with the Seagate 1 or 2TB ES drives. Sure they cost a bit more, but they are enterprise grade satas with 5 year warranty. If you are fitting 5 drives into a single box you'll appreciate the vibration reduction alone.... (for the lower failure rate, not the noise factor)

Why are you going USB 3.0 and not ethernet? Is it just due to cost, and her being the only user? (just curious)

Be wary of the warranty status too, the WD Green drives are classified as desktop

WD will have no liability for any Product returned if WD determines that:

The product was stolen from WD.
The asserted defect:
is not present,
cannot reasonably be fixed because of damage occurring when the Product is in the possession of someone other than WD, or
is attributable to misuse, improper installation, alteration (including removing or obliterating labels and opening or removing external covers (unless authorized to do so by Western Digital or an authorized Service Center)), accident or mishandling while in the possession of someone other than WD.
The Product was not sold to you as new.
The product was not used in accordance with Western Digital specifications and instructions.
The product was not used for its intended function (for example, desktop drives used in an Enterprise environment).

I've heard that the drobo is the best way to go for data backup.


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Only recommendation.

# Use Raid 1 Mirroring instead of raid 10,4,5 (They're just another point of failure when your data goes down you don't want the pain of either technology and rebuild times.
# Don't buy cheap NAS units some of the consumer products are some nasty pieces of **** when it comes to data recovery
# Don't use USB for data transfer when looking for > 2TB of data, usb 2.0 will take 5 days to successfully do a backup of the NAS
# Minimal 1gbps ethernet, for backup and restore you will thank me later
# Go for Windows Home Server, its a very good product and Microsoft supports Mirroring each one of your machines to the home server
# Do NOT BUY the hard-disk from the same manufacture product line. 5x drives died on me (personal experience all from the same batch)
# Raid is not a backup solution, you will need to also seek another NAS to do schedule backup's of the first NAS (best over Sata Link)