NAS review - suggestions

[vskatusa]

One of the feature that needs to be tested in every NAS review is the disk failure simulation and replacing disks.

For example what happens if you have a failure in WHS of one disk?

I am sure RAID is no solution for backup, but for people who are looking purely for a media server backup is a over kill (since the original media is available anyway), and I personally would be ok with 1 drive failure (RAID 5).

Another feature to test is expanding an existing disk. For example if you pull out 500GB disk and replace it with 1TB disk how long does it take to rebuild?

 

[thiggins]

In general, we do a pull-a-drive test on on multi-drive NASes. However, we neglected to do that for the HP MediaSmarts. Next time we will.

Remember that disk failure is only one of the ways that a RAID array can fail. Power supply and controller failure are others, both of which will wipe your entire array. Having original media (CDs, DVDs) is certainly a valid form of backup. But re-ripping can take quite awhile.

We generally try to note build times, but need to be more consistent. Thanks for the reminder. Rebuild times are the shortest when you leave the NAS alone during the rebuild. But they still will be on the order of hours.