Enterprise 2 Drive USB Storage Devices
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@Dashrender said:
@DustinB3403 said:
I guess a better question would be.
if you had absolutely no other choice and had to buy a 2 bay enclosure for External USB storage, what would you go with?
I guess my question should have been, does it have to be USB?
That's what I was asking about about stepping back and looking at the bigger solution set.
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@DustinB3403 said:
Yes (at least with what we have currently) Which that is planning on being changed to newer hardware.
Why would newer hardware be needed for network access?
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In our current environment we're very limited to the available 3.5" or 2.5" bays to install spinning rust, or SSD's.
But we have plenty of USB access on each of these systems.
Anyways that is outside of the scope of the question. Which if you had to purchase USB External storage, what would you purchase for use in a business (enterprise) environment.
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@DustinB3403 said:
Anyways that is outside of the scope of the question.
It's not at all. We are trying to get you to think at the goal level, not at the "already selected solution" level. You should never hesitate to step back and think about your goals.
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My goal personally in any system would be to have the storage directly attached to the server. And not use external USB drives as network shares.
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@DustinB3403 said:
Which if you had to purchase USB External storage, what would you purchase for use in a business (enterprise) environment.
Business and enterprise do not mean the same thing. Enterprises do not purchases USB drives, plain and simple. Businesses do all of the time. Nothing wrong with that, small businesses have very different needs than enterprises much of the time. The cost of managing individual USB drives is so high no enterprise would ever even talk about getting them.
What you are looking for is SMB verging on home use storage literally falling just below the home line, in many ways.
That you feel you need an enterprise class solution and are conflating that with wanting USB two bay storage and you are looking to replace a consumer unit means that the goal is blurry here. You are starting from a solution and trying to come up with a good way to do a non-enterprise action without stating what the final result is meant to be. IT should never work in a technical bubble without considering the business goal - that's what separates the IT from the button pushers, we need the business context.
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@DustinB3403 said:
In our current environment we're very limited to the available 3.5" or 2.5" bays to install spinning rust, or SSD's.
But we have plenty of USB access on each of these systems.
None of this is a reason for what you are doing and suggests the goal has been missed. Yes that you CAN do USB is not in question. Presumably you have plenty of networking on your servers too. And you've mentioned being limited to every drive type - so essentially unlimited.
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@DustinB3403 said:
In our current environment we're very limited to the available 3.5" or 2.5" bays to install spinning rust, or SSD's.
OK, but what is wrong with NAS instead of USB attached storage? Unless you're using USB 3, NAS is often faster than USB 2.0. It's super easy to map almost any computer to use it over the network.
But we have plenty of USB access on each of these systems.
But why are you limited to USB or internal only use? Why not NAS?
Anyways that is outside of the scope of the question. Which if you had to purchase USB External storage, what would you purchase for use in a business (enterprise) environment.
Drobo has (or at least did in the past) have an 8 bay USB attached (or one server ISCSI attached) device. They may have a smaller one still for sale, I don't know though.
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True, NAS would be an option. I'm simply looking at alternative in a very general light of anything other than laCie as 2 distinct units have both had drives fail with 3 weeks of each other.
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@DustinB3403 said:
My goal personally in any system would be to have the storage directly attached to the server. And not use external USB drives as network shares.
That's not a goal, that's still a solution. A goal should have no technical bits in it whatsoever. What reason would the CEO have for requesting this storage? How would he say it to you? Not how an IT person would state what they think is the solution.
The goal would be something along the lines of "We have a large number of documents that need to be used simultaneously by a few dozen users."
Then we can whittle down technical requirements from there.
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@DustinB3403 I edited your last statement to add a much needed comma that kind of changes the meaning of the post.
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If NAS is an option, that changes everything. The whole set of problems that you are facing (not business class, bizarre sounding requirements, etc.) is all because NAS is being ruled out. We still need to think at the goal level, but almost certainly the answer here would be NAS, not a USB drive bay.
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If a NAS is possible, we have a Synology DS414j and it seems to work fine. No issues (yet). It's a 4 bay, not a 2.
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@johnhooks said:
If a NAS is possible, we have a Synology DS414j and it seems to work fine. No issues (yet). It's a 4 bay, not a 2.
The DS214 should be a two bay.
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The DS214 is available in the fire proof ioSafe option too from @robb-moore's company.
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Then the goal would be.
We have a lot of data that needs to be available for reference in the future, just in case a client ever needs or wants to use it again, how can we save this data?
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@Reid-Cooper said:
@johnhooks said:
If a NAS is possible, we have a Synology DS414j and it seems to work fine. No issues (yet). It's a 4 bay, not a 2.
The DS214 should be a two bay.
I was just pointing out ours was a 4, in case he wanted to look at that model. And it's only ~$50 more than the 214+
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@DustinB3403 said:
Then the goal would be.
We have a lot of data that needs to be available for reference in the future, just in case a client ever needs or wants to use it again, how can we save this data?
Why couldn't you use something like onedrive? 1TB for $7 a month and you get Office 365 (if you're using Windows).
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@DustinB3403 said:
Then the goal would be.
We have a lot of data that needs to be available for reference in the future, just in case a client ever needs or wants to use it again, how can we save this data?
The the next questions would be...
- How quickly do you need to retrieve it?
- Is this the archive or the backup of an archive?
- How does it need to be accessed or how do you feel the access will take place?
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Retrieval must support on-demand (at customer request)
It's the archive nothing more.
Accessed as a network share so the department who is building these files can also archive them at the EoL (for that file)
