Newb: What would you spend £/€100 on...? (4 bay disk/server enclosure)

Hi,

My son is graduating from his Film & TV production course in the next couple of months and I'd like to give him a file server as a graduation present. (Is that weird btw...? )

His projects routinely involve 4TB of video files, which is quite a bit... I'm suggesting a RAID 5 setup using OMV.

I don't have a massive budget, £500 *max*. £400 of this will go on the disks themselves. What would you put them in?

I have several HP Proliant N36L boxes which suit me fine but to transfer 4TB on and off one of these would take half a day, even over e-SATA.

I also have several Mac Minis 7,1 which have a decent spec, dual core i7 processors, which I could run an enclosure from.

I'm suggesting he just use this box as storage and then has a large SSD drive to do actual editing on...

What would you spend the money on? Happy to source something used. A mini server like the HP or an enclosure? Some other approach? It's important that the setup is *hardware agnostic*.

If I ran an enclosure off the Mac Mini, would that work? How would things connect? The enclosure attached to one USB port and his PC to another?

Any thoughts gratefully received

S

Edit: Just found this... Does OpenMediaVault work well with external Thunderbolt and USB storage?

Does OMV not run on USB/Thunderbolt attached enclosures...?

Quote from ryecoaaron

I would look at an intel n100 system that has a 2.5gbps network adapter with 4tb nvme stick (much faster than raid 5). I think you could do that in your budget.

But this wouldn't give any sort of redundancy would it...? This is just for storage. Correct me if I've misunderstood.

Quote from ryecoaaron

On the storage side, correct. But nothing else about any those systems are redundant. And a hard drive failing is much more likely than nvme failing. External enclosure just add more items that can and do fail. I've had many external enclosures fail but never an nvme stick. There is no backup in either scenario. I would add a 4TB (or larger) hard drive (could be usb) for backup.

Ok, I think I understand... In my scenario he could have upwards of 9TB maybe 12TB storage on conventional HDDs though. I understand there's no backup but there would be redundancy. No?

Edit: and if the enclosure failed, OMV could save things in a new enclosure...?

Quote from ryecoaaron

True. You only mentioned 4TB. So, I thought that was all the space that was needed.

It's probably all he needs for any given project but he needs more storage ideally.

in raid 5 on your mentioned setups, the only thing that would have redundancy is the hard drive. No redundancy on power supplies or network connection or enclosure or anything else. I'm curious why you are so concerned with redundancy?

Drive redundancy is just good practice. No? I'd like a setup which is hardware agnostic so it could always be rebuilt should any of the HW fail. Other than drive redundancy, he won't need *instant* HW redundancy, just something that is relatively secure. He might get a Backblaze subscription for backups I guess...

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Quote from ryecoaaron

Drive redundancy is a good practice in the enterprise world or where you can't tolerate any down time. For a home user, backups are far important in my opinion. Raid 5 only gives you one drive redundancy. If another fails while the array is degraded or while rebuilding the array (stressful on the drives), you lose all data. Is there going to be a cold drive to replace the failed drive? if not, running the array degraded for even a few days is dangerous.

That is why we push running snapraid and mergerfs to pool the drives. You only lose the data on the drive the fail but the pool stays up. snapraid allows you to rebuild the data when the drive is replaced. But with video editing, mergerfs is possible too slow since it is limited to single drive speed. It is also hard to build a cheap video editing system.

I don't run raid on any of my systems anymore. I use backups and multiple servers for redundancy.

This is only about storage. The video editing itself would happen on a smaller SSD. It's file transfer speeds which is the issue.

I do take your point about backups being more important though... In a way, the RAID 5 box would be the backup for the SSD on which the editing is done. The RAID could then be backed up to a single usb drive. That's the setup I have.

Does that make any sense as an approach?