How to build a 40TB Raid drive for under $1000 

RU-vid is automatically hiding your other comment, not sure how to fix it. But to answer your question, I chose the QNAP because of two main things. 1. I didn’t have a super big need for the features of a NAS. Local storage is good for me for the time being. 2. (Most importantly) the QNAP enclosure shown here uses a hardware raid rather than software raid. Meaning it takes the maintenance of building the disks off the computer and into some tech inside the drive bays. I am able to only use the software then to check up on the health of my drives. Being on a Mac this saved me a few headaches after deciding I wanted to go RAID 5.

We actually moved our workflow over to dropbox when their enterprise still included unlimited. It wasn't too hard to link Dropbox to an external drive as its "home" folder. Since then, dropbox has done away with unlimited and that has become cost prohibitive. We have a Thunderbay 8 as well now. I still use the QNAP for personal stuff and the drives from this video are still running and appear healthy. Though I am not regularly pulling from it as I once was. It does stay somewhat active. I wish I had a better solution. We have since done away w Backblaze and moved to the raid / dropbox workflow. And then for projects over 3 years that we want to keep (stuff beyond the typical dayrate dump footage stuff) we moved to LTO as a long term solution. The LTO reader is expensive, and you have to buy the software, but then the tapes are only like 100 bucks a pop after that for around 18TB. its slow, but its secure and we feel good about that for now. Usually if its over 3 years and not super important its depreciated in value anyway and rare a client wants to pull from it in our cases. hope that helps.

This has lived behind my machine since I made this video and I have never been annoyed by it. I wouldn’t consider it loud or bothersome.

@@RyanTimms thanks!

With Spinning SATA drives it's pretty slow. Under 100 mb/s. If you use SSD's it will be fast. 500 mb/s.

@@andrewmcgill4957 No, the point is that they don't provide a control that can realize higher speeds with SSDs (or HDDs, which is absolutely possible by the way with spinning drives in Raid 0). QNAP German customer support clearly avoids this issue when asked.

@@andieymi interesting!

@@andieymi QNAP claims 200 mb/s in 2 different testing environments using a Samsung SSD Raid 10 setup, and 4 seagate HDD's Raid 0

@@andrewmcgill4957 Yes, and that's a controller problem. Both configurations should do way over 200MB/s - at times when even larger single HDDS reach nearly 200MB/s. And the QNAP can't. Which is a bummer. The USB 3.1 is purely hypothetical, as that's just half of what can be theoretically achieved with USB 3.0 UASP. So using these for speed just doesn't make sense I guess.

I just did a little bit more research and saw that it can be used as both a DAS or NAS Expansion enclosure.

Thank you for the great video 🙌🏾🌟🙌🏾

You can do this but if you do add more drives to the array you will have to wipe clean and start fresh with the old two.

@@RyanTimms I thought you could later add two more drives and create a new RAID 1 pair without affecting the original two. Is this not the case?

@@PatrickDSimpson I believe with this particular unit you need to wipe and start fresh. Since making this video I have moved to a Thunderbay. I had some issues with reliability after extended use for a few years. I suspect my TR004 was the issue. My hard drives inside still work as expected. I cleared everything off of this and have upgraded. It was much more expensive but hard to put a price on this data when clients are paying for it.

@@RyanTimms Good to know. I'm hoping with just moderate use it'll last a while. Not sure I can justify spending Thunderbay kind of money at this point.

That is possible now, but at the time of filming and the drives that I purchased ran similar speed tests. Its possible this has changed but I've had great experience with my system so far!