Drives for Storage at home

[Trapper]

Am I doing this right? Today a nice shiney package arrived - 2x 6TB WD Reds to replace my now full 2x 4TB WD Greens. The Reds were on offer!

 

For the last two years I've had my drives in Raid 1 plugged into a USB 3 Buffalo Drive Station (not a NAS, USB 3 into PC, then out via the gigabit network card). The idea being that if I needed my data out of the house I could take the box, or in the event of a fire I could save my precious data (so data then cats then wife!).

 

Recently I've had buffering problems with videos, 480p DVD rips not just HD BR rips. Pauses, stutters and VLC had go blocky for a few seconds.

 

Now I have these new drives I don't know whether it would be better to install them directly into my PC on two SATA III channels, or to keep them in the USB 3.0 enclosure.

 

I've only taken the enclosure out from home once, so I don't really need the portability.

 

Any ideas?

[Trapper]

Gah bloody Buffalo!

 

Turns out their Drive Station Duo USB 3 can handle drives up to and above 8TB - but unless you buy it with them there is a catch. The software and the firmware will only partition drives up to 4TB.

 

Spent all evening figuring it out, but if you place new Drive-Over-4TB into your PC and format it (with all options as required) and then with drive 2 leave it partition-less and put them back into the device it will then "rebuild" the array and start working fine.

 

Stupid hardware!

[Trapper]

*snore* *snore* *ARRGHHGGGGHPPPHzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz*

 

[synaesthesia]

Yeah, bufallo's kit isn't great on the performance front Had many an annoyance with our Terastations!

[LincolnE]

Indeed. We still have a bunch of terrastations knocking about here. Terrible things, by my reckoning.

[cpjitservices]

Netgear ReadyNAS are quite good I think you can get a home version too.. Although I tend to home brew my NAS Boxes these days.

[SHimmer45]

i have a buffalo linkstation at home and even in RAID0 the performance isnt brilliant. if youre after "proper" performance for streaming/copying etc either brew your own nas or just a different NAS from someone like QNAP.

 

i will be rolling my own nas when i out grow my linkstation with a low power celeron or something similar on a board with a good SATA controller or perhaps i PCI-e card depending on how many drives i end up using.