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What Size of USB3 Backup Drives for Astro Images?

Gina

By Gina
in DIY Astronomer

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Gina

Gina

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I'm looking at buying a USB3 backup drive and probably Western Digital.  The question is do I buy 4TB for best "bytes per buck" or several smaller drives.  4TB is £90,  2TB is £71 and 1TB is £45.  ie. the 4TB is twice the "bytes per buck" compared with the 1TB.   OTOH these drives are relatively inexpensive compared with other astro equipment.  Maybe 4TB is "too many eggs in one basket", having just had a 4TB drive fail.

I would appreciate recommendations.  Thank you.

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vlaiv

vlaiv

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My choice of "safe" storage is DIY NAS server.

It is a bit more involved then getting a ready made solution but it offers more flexibility and probably greater protection for data.

Something simple like small rig running FreeNAS (run from USB stick) and 4x1TB disks - 3 connected in raid Z (ZFS file system) - with fourth being backup in case when any of raided disks fail.

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Stub Mandrel

Stub Mandrel

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55 minutes ago, Gina said:

I'm looking at buying a USB3 backup drive and probably Western Digital.  The question is do I buy 4TB for best "bytes per buck" or several smaller drives.  4TB is £90,  2TB is £71 and 1TB is £45.  ie. the 4TB is twice the "bytes per buck" compared with the 1TB.   OTOH these drives are relatively inexpensive compared with other astro equipment.  Maybe 4TB is "too many eggs in one basket", having just had a 4TB drive fail.

I would appreciate recommendations.  Thank you.

I bought a 2TB for my general backups.

I have to discard my planetary AVIs once processed = 60-80 GB a night is too much!

I am planning to get a big external drive for all my astro backups soon, rather than cramming them all alongside everything else..

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Gina

Gina

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One thing I don't like about USB3 drives is that they're portable IOW they can easily be damaged.  Probably what happened to my 4TB Seagate USB3 drive which I've found no longer works!  Fat lot of use as a backup if it fails!!!

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Anthonyexmouth

Anthonyexmouth

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3 minutes ago, Gina said:

One thing I don't like about USB3 drives is that they're portable IOW they can easily be damaged.  Probably what happened to my 4TB Seagate USB3 drive which I've found no longer works!  Fat lot of use as a backup if it fails!!!

mechanical hard drives are fairly good at being transported, where they are at most risk is being knocked while in operation. when switched off the heads are parked but when in use and knocked the heads can strike the platter and then theres potential for damage

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coatesg

coatesg

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Ok - so the drive numbers is the MTBF argument again. With this being equal for different capacities, more drives are likely to result in more frequent failures. So go for biggest you can afford, within reason (no point getting way more space if you'll never need it!).

I have to say that using a NAS as a backup in RAID1 is sufficient for me. If one drive dies, replace asap and resync. If the NAS enclosure dies, you still have the drives and the originals. If you can put the NAS separate from the source then all the better - I have NAS in house, source in office in garden.

Cloud backup great - not sure prime allows huge amounts of non imag backup.

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cjdawson

cjdawson

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I spent a small fortune setting up my home network.  Ended up getting 2 Netgear ReadyNas.   One is a 204 and the other is the 214.  Both units currently have 3 * 4TB WD Red drives in them.  the 204 is turned on only to back up the 214.  The 214 is on all the time and this is the one that I'll use day to day.   Currently, I have 12Tb of storage which is plenty for now.  If I want to expand, I'll be looking to install larger drives, as it upgrades from Netgear means that both my NAS boxes currently support 48TB of storage.

 

On the smaller drive front.   I have noticed that there have been offers going around on the WD 4TB Passport.  If you can catch one, you might be able to get one for about £50.

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fozzybear

fozzybear

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2 drives = mirrored on a nas if you have more than 3 drives you have a striped set, if setup correctly  minimum raid5/9 set so you can loose one drive and it will build automatically if you change one of the drives ,

you have 3*4tb what are they configured for redundancy/throughput you say you have 12tb so no redundancy if one drive fails the raid fails so no raid level set. if you have 3 X 4tb drives setup at raid 5/9 you have available 8tb data available

andy

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cjdawson

cjdawson

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@fozzybear.   It is 12Tb setup in raid 5, which does indeed give me 8TB available storage.  With one drive redundancy.    I have this setup in each NAS.  This means that I have the advantage that is one NAS dies, then the other is still available.  Some people will describe this as overkill.  however, I'm going to counter that with the argument that some of the data stored on setup is irreplaceable.

 

Oh and for those interested.   One NAS box is at the back of the house, the other is at the front.   This is the closest that I can get to off site backup.  (without having access to a second site)      I don't want to use cloud storage for this as the total cost of ownership will be too high.

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