Every digital photographer has one common problem. How and where to store all those huge digital RAW files safely?

CDs & DVDs are of a limited capacity and will eventually have problems with reading them. Online storage websites are cheap if you only have a few gigabytes of data, but for us photographers it usually hits the a few terrabytes, tape drives are obsolete and horrendously slow, so that leaves us essentially with hard drives. While they work most of the time, there is always a possibility (correction, a definite point in time) when the drive will fail.

We all have heard (or worse) experienced the agony of having a hard drive fail on you.The files, the videos, the music, the photographs and more importantly the memories that go along with that drive failure.

Hard drives, a timebomb waiting to happen… Unless you RAID them!

I personally have had 4 or 5 drives fail on me before and after the first one died and I had to pay $500 to retrieve the data, I made it a point to make sure I run redundancy.

So off I went to find a solution to my ever pressing storage woes. My first solution was a Stardom RAID 1 casing. It essentially mirrors two hard drives back to back automatically thus if one fails, you can replace it with another without losing any data.

Well I bought 2 such casings and both have failed. One was during the warranty period and as such it got replaced, but the other is now a paperweight. (The one that’s still working is exceptionally noisy due to the fans!!)

I also have a buffalo terrastation NAS. While it can store >1TB of data, it’s HORRIBLY SLOW. It’s so slow that I’m reluctant to use it. Not to mention it cost me a fair amount of money. The terrastation also has one major flaw, should one drive fail, you cannot replace the drive yourself. In addition, should more than one drive fail, you practically lose all your data.

When my second Stardom passed on, I started my search once again for another off the shelf remedy to my storage woes. I then came upon the Drobo. Lots of positive reviews and the ability to use any drive you want. But the lower end drobos were USB 2.0 only (groan) and the higher end ones cost >$1000 just for the casing. And should the casing fail, you have no chance of retrieving your data short of buying another Drobo.

So what now…

After some googling I came across a software known as unRAID by Lime Technology. Essentially it’s a RAID OS that you can purchase (or use for free with certain limitations) to build your own DIY NAS (network attached storage).

What drew me into it was the fact that I could expand my storage as and when I required. I could just upgrade my 500GB drives to 2TB drives in the future, or I could even add up to 20 (yes TWENTY) hard drives in a single array (if you buy the Pro licence). On top of that, user reports have stated that the transfer speeds are comparable if not faster than off the shelf solutions. In addition, should any component fail, I can just go to the store and buy the component!

It sounded too good to be true… but more googling later and being the tinkerer that I am, I was ready to do it. I was ready to build my own DIY RAID NAS!

Here are the components I bought to build the NAS:

So I wired up all the cables, followed the unRAID installation procedures and managed to fire it up without a hitch. I managed to access the server and I tried copying over a large file. You can imagine how thrilled I was when I saw that I was hitting 50-80MB/s transfer speeds onto the NAS!

All wired up!

However my thrill was shortlived. I soon realised that while I could transfer data onto the NAS, I couldn’t even open a JPEG without the server jamming up. I tried just about everything, reformat, change cables, change router, only to realise that the Gigabit LAN port on my motherboard was somehow not compatible. I replaced it with a seperate PCI Gigabit NIC and everything is up and running again. Mind you this took me 2 days to figure out!!!

Now I have 4TBs of protected storage space (1.5TB reserved for parity, 0.5TB for cache) that’s expandable to 8TB (or more!!) should I need to in future!

I’m still setting it up but since I’ve started I’ve added more fans to my casing (try doing that on a Drobo!), installed an app that e-mails me when a drive goes down  and streamed video wirelessly from the server to my TV in the living room (via a Western Digital Live TV player with attached wireless USB dongle)!

PCI LAN cable added. (Notice the half dead Stardom RAID1 casing on the left)

My completed Do It Yourself (DIY) Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) Network Attached Storage (NAS)

I’ll try to post some updates once I’ve used it for a bit longer but so far I’m just thrilled that I managed to find a solution that won’t leave me stranded once something goes wrong.

If you are interested in building one for yourself, I strongly suggest you read as much as possible from the unRAID website & forums before embarking on this. I also strongly advise that you choose a motherboard that’s been tested to be compatible with unRAID.

(By the way, I have no affiliation with the folks from Lime Technology at all, or any other manufacturer for that matter, just wanted to share some info to fellow photographers (geeky or not)).

UPDATE
The TP-Link PCI Gigabit Network Adapter works fine, BUT it doesn’t support Wake on LAN, that’s a problem.

Traditional external hard drives keep the drives spun up at all times and this results in heat build up and eventual drive failure.

The NAS that I’ve built (and I believe other off the shelf NAS) spin down the drives when they are not required. This not only helps extend the lifespan of the drives, it also saves energy.

Now, to save even MORE energy, I wanted to have the array go to S3 sleep when it wasn’t in use, and I wanted it to go to sleep automatically. At sleep it draws <10W of power and should be able to be woken up by a magic packet sent via the LAN network.

The problem with the TP-Link NIC that I bought was that it somehow refuses to wake the server, I had to swap it out with my Dlink card from another computer. I even bought an Asus NX1101 but that does not work with unRAID.

So now with the cache disk, I’m getting an average of 50MB/s transfers into the NAS. That’s about 10x more than on my store bought Buffalo Terrastation!