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[JavaLawyer]

I am looking to purchase the DNS-343 and have a data backup question:

If all four internal drives are formatted in "standard" mode (i.e. as individual drives), can the backup option in the firmware be set perform incremental or full backups using two of the DNS343 internal drives as the source and two internal DNS343 internal drives as the destination?

DNS-343 HDD 1 & 2 - contains source data [source]
DNS-343 HDD 3 & 4 - backup [destination]

I am looking to create a nightly mirror without using RAID.
(I'm sure the DNS343 can choose internal drives as the destination, but how about for source data?)

Thanks!

[hilaireg]

Just curious ... why not use the Mirror function built-in to the product?

Cheers,

[JavaLawyer]

I personally don't trust RAID (especially software implemented RAID) and prefer individually formatted drives. with an independent backup.

[hilaireg]

Interesting ...

Few points to consider:

- Backing up data from one drive to another will not guarrantee the integrity of the data stored on the HDD's
- The backplane on the DNS could fail causing catastrophic corruption of all disks
- A Windows utility or Linux system that permits reading of EXT2/EXT3 filesystems in case of a hardware failure on the DNS
- An additional DNS to which you copy your data for fail-over purposes


I have two (2) DNS-343's, both of which are configured in RAID 5 using four (4) 1TB HDD's.  All the HDD's are the same: manufacturer, model, and firmware.  Additionally, I purchased two (2) additional 1TB HDD's as "spares".

I keep one DNS on all the time and bring the other DNS online from time-to-time to synchronize the contents using a utility called Beyond Compare.

There are several posts on the forum that discuss RAID in great detail; take some time to read through them as you may find that RAID solutions are generally quite robust these days.  One of the forum post goes as far as to discuss software VS hardware and what the gotcha's are.

If you have any questions, feel to ask away ... there are many knowledgeable folks that will be happy to clarify any mysteries about RAID.

Cheers,

[JavaLawyer]

When RAID is working, it works great. . . When something goes wrong with RAID, it's quite often catastrophic.  I've seen more than my fair share of RAID issues over the years.

Even if I wanted to use RAID (which I don't), I can't b/c the current DNS firmware doesn't fully support seagate 1.5 TB drives (yet).  Short of cobbling together a NAS using an old box and FreeNAS, I was looking for a quick and dirty solution to backup ~2.5 TB of data rather quickly.

Regardless of RAID's maturity and stability, storing data on a single drive is always safer than striping information across multiple hdds (with multiple failure points).  Not to mention the need to maintain spare hdds (ideally the same make, model, and lot number).  Also, if the DNS fails (independent of the RAID array), the only way to access the data is to purchase an identical DNS.  There are too many potential failure points.  I will sleep better using third party software to perform manual backups and lose 50% of my storage capacity rather than using a RAID solution and risk (albeit a minimal risk)  losing everything for that addition ~25% of storage.

[hilaireg]

Fair enough ...

My experiences have usually been quite favourable with RAID and generally, I recommend RAID over non-raided volumes - success with HDD's however has been not-so-favourable; I dispose of at least one HDD/month.   I for one prefer Hot Swapable RAID but I was not expecting that much for the DNS price-point.

That said, I appreciate the points you make ... most certainly not trying to convince you either way - was simply curious.

Cheers,