Simple Video Backup Server

[Chris Moore]

RAID on my workstation is failing I think. Over the past few days/weeks it's been extremely hot and every day I've noticed increased performance drops. Today R/W speeds are non workable. Surely those are signs of failure right?

It ins't a good sign. Any chance of some cooling? Perhaps a small window unit? I am not sure what your options are. When I lived over there, I was in a building that had been built in the 1930s and there was radiators for heat in winter, but cooling in summer was down to opening the windows and fans.

 

[woods]

4x 3TB disks running in RAID0 via a Dawicontrol card for video editing, not redundancy. Problem is: I have a couple of files on there that I didn't backup yet.

When I connect the hard drives, windows takes ages to boot. During booting, sometimes yellow letters flash for just a second, saying something about OC Genie, not sure what. When the RAID is connected, Windows is super slow and it increased virtually exponentially by every new boot. Now it just reaches a blue waiting screen and freezes.

When I disconnect them, Windows seems to boot and run properly, although I just got a drive error message from within windows itself and then it even froze. Had to power off. After reboot, it seems normal again. Smells a lot like a failing boot SSD... perhaps.

Is it possible the SSD and RAID are failing both at the same time, after all these years? Would be quite a coincidence although given the extreme weather who knows.. Can't make heads nor tails from it.

I kinda worked around it and have most of the files I need although it would be nice to recover the remaining ones on the RAID as well...

Before it refused to startup, I managed to copy most of the files I needed. The initial read speeds were very slow but then went up. Always at the start of a new file it would slow down, then speed up to normal speed. Really weird. Any experience with that?

EDIT:
CrystalDiskInfo says nothing is wrong with the SSD - the error messages haven't returned. System seems to operate as normal.

EDIT_2:
System still seems stable. SSD is probably fine.

Another question keeps bugging me: I think that for long term archival it doesn't really make that much sense to offer this service to my clients, most of them don't really need it. The ones that do probably have their own storage solutions.

So the questions begs: perhaps I should make the server more of a work raid. Most of my projects run into multiple TB's of data and there are always multiple projects running along side each other. My old 8TB RAID that just died was always filled up and I often had to make very difficult decisions to make space, a lot of which I came to regret later. Eventually I even ended up buying another 8 drives for individual archival.

Having a good buffer would be good. So that I only have to make archival choices once or maybe twice a year.

But the thing is: I'm wondering if it would be a good idea to expand the function of the system to suit my video editing and compositing needs. In the end it might be much simpler to just have one good system handling all my data needs rather then having an individual editing RAID.

So after some thinking, I guess it isn't so much a backup server I'm looking to build but more of a general, fast storage system over network.

This way I can use the capital saved on the workstation RAID and use it to improve the capacity of the NAS. Thoughts?