Evaluating unRAID for Professional Photography Archive


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I am a photographer attempting to find a file storage solution for our photo studio. We are a young studio with only 3TB of data, but we are growing at about 2TB per year. All of our data is currently stored on a single 5TB external drive backed up in the cloud to Backblaze. 
 
I would really like to get a more robust on-site backup solution that enables us to expand our storage seamlessly and recover from a drive failure without any data loss. I am trying to figure out the hardware costs of building my own system vs. buying something off the rack. 
 
Are you able to hot swap failed drives with unRAID like you can with Drobo? How easy is it to add new drives into the array, and how much space is available for data vs. redundancy?
 
What is the file transfer like for users on OSX? Does the system mount like a single external drive or do I need some kind of file transfer software?
 
What kind of hardware requirements do I need to worry about getting started with? Is 8GB of RAM enough? Do I need EEC RAM?
 
What's the minimum CPU I can get away with if I'm just using this for archival photo storage and the occasional transfer?
 
After setting up the system, can I just plug it into my router to get access to it over the network? Can I also plug into it directly for faster transfers?
 
Is it possible to setup access via the internet so that I can access files remotely?
 
Besides individual drive failures, is there anything else I need to worry about that could cause data loss? If one of the other components dies (motherboard, cpu, flash storage with OS), can I just rebuild the system without any data loss? 
 
Thanks so much for your help. I'm still pretty early in the process of trying to figure out which solution makes the most sense for our needs but from what I've been reading unRAID sounds like a pretty perfect fit. Any tips or advice is great appreciated!
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9 hours ago, jfredson said:

Are you able to hot swap failed drives with unRAID like you can with Drobo? How easy is it to add new drives into the array, and how much space is available for data vs. redundancy?

Hit swap is no problem as long as it's supported by your hardware.

 

9 hours ago, jfredson said:

What is the file transfer like for users on OSX? Does the system mount like a single external drive or do I need some kind of file transfer software?

Each share you configure on the unRAID server will mount as a single volume on your Mac regardless of the number of drives the share uses. File transfer speeds depend on the hardware configuration of the unRAID server. Writing to an SSD cache is much faster than writing directly to the parity protected array.

 

Is it possible to setup access via the internet so that I can access files remotely?

You can, but you should be aware that the basic unRAID install has little in the way of internet security. You'll need to install 3rd party dockers like OpenVPN-AS to provide that.

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The great thing about unRAID is the OS lives on your USB stick and loads into RAM on boot. All of your Data drives are useable space and if there is a drive problem it uses the other drives along with the Parity Drive to emulate the data. Also your data is not dependent on any motherboard, CPU or any other configurations so you at any time pull your USB out and all your drives and install into newer hard ware. 

 

As for Hot swappable basically the way it works for me in the simplist terms is you get an error message and shut down the array, swap out the problem drive with a new drive and turn back on. The system sees the new drive and rebuilds the data and of course its viewable/writeable by the user which should in part leave you with no down time. 

 

With user shares  you can more or less install all the drives you want and when you create a share or multiple shares it looks like one folder spread across as many or as few drives as you choose. Only have 1TB to start then that's all you get. Slap in a second drive or  a larger your share grows to that size. Think of Shares like Folders that the OS manages for you. You just setup the basic info an it takes care of the rest. 

 

As for connectivity your server will sit on your network like an appliance and you simply map your Mac, Windows machine or whatever device to it. Obviously you can set user logins and passwords for individual users. However as for remote login from outside your network it's possible, but just keep in mind if you can access others very well may try as well and they could put your data at risk, however there are so many cloud apps that you can sync with essentially giving you some remote acces. I use Dropbox myself so I can sync data from my MacBook to my unRAID and back. 

 

Also so the great thing about unRAID/Linux is there are so many Plugins/Dockers that many will more than likely cover all your needs or you could simply write some scripts to do normal tasks you may find you need. 

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10 hours ago, jfredson said:
What kind of hardware requirements do I need to worry about getting started with? Is 8GB of RAM enough? Do I need EEC RAM?
 
What's the minimum CPU I can get away with if I'm just using this for archival photo storage and the occasional transfer?

A modern Pentium and 4GB of RAM is fine to start, an i3 and 8GB of RAM is generous for basic NAS duties.

 

FYI, if it helps:

 

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