I’m seeking opinions on a local network-available backup storage medium. All my machines would back up to this volume. I have a spare local machine running headless and I’m tempted to just plug in some external drives on a RAID 1 configuration, but should I get a NAS? Dunno.
Okay, I've ordered a pair of 6TB external drives for RAID-redundant Time Machine backups, should be here next weekend 🙌 A lot cheaper than a NAS 😅 Thanks for the validation all!
The RAID array is all set up and working :+1: I had some trouble getting macOS Time Machine to behave, but figured it out eventually. Two drives -> RAID 1 array -> Encrypted APFS format -> two APFS volumes (one for each computer to use as a TM backup destination).
The initial backup, over wifi, took a few days 😅 But it did finish, and incremental backups are quick!
@ashfurrow My last raid build was raid 10. Not actually the tenth version but combines raid 0 and raid 1. 4 drives, twice as fast as one drive.
@ashfurrow Striping using raid 0 is great for speed but multiplies the chance of failure which is why raid 1/0 is recommended for the mirroring. However, The performance charts I've seen say raid 5 (stripe,stripe,CRC) is better for SQL server as it writes to the drives faster.
@AskChip nice! striping seems really cool.