Best posts made by jim9500

I'm currently using an 34 HP 3TB drives with an array configured for Raid 10 ADM (every drive set = 3 redundant drives) + 1 spare. Drives are sitting in 3 d32600 DAS boxes connected to a P822 controller in an HP DL360 g8 running Windows Server 2012 with a single 30TB share. This volume has about 30 million files that are accessed daily for a period of 1 - 3 months by 25 people before the data is archived to offline storage. Server is a stand alone bare metal installation.

It's important to be cheap, reliable & easy to manage as possible if I get hit by a bus. The only way I've found to do this is ride 1 - 2 generation old enterprise equipment (HP is what has worked well for me). Everything I've purchased is used (except for drives).

I am happy with my Windows + HP situation & 48TB would be fine for the next 2 - 3 years. Unless there's a big risk I'm just not factoring in. When I was asking for advice before & moving from an inherited 18TB / Raid 6 setup on Spiceworks a few years ago several people mentioned a possible concern about large NTFS volumes. Have any of you used 48TB Windows volumes? Any resources on risk analysis vs ZFS?

It seems like I remember Scott Miller talking about combining enterprise hardware + SAS/SATA Controller + Linux for storage requirements vs proprietary hardware raid controller.

@Donahue - Yes. I have a similar setup offsite backup several miles away for disaster recovery / hardware failure etc. I know raid != backups.

@scottalanmiller said in Incorporating Ransomware Protection into Backup Plan:

D2D2T

Appreciate all of the input. This is the solution I've been leaning towards over the last week. Had an infrastructure hiccup & haven't been able to spend any time on this. But I will utilize my existing backup device for the backup disk & incorporate standard LTO-8 drive library with a rotating weekly offsite storage.

@travisdh1 said in Safe to have a 48TB Windows volume?:

The triple mirror means that you will have increased read speed. If you don't need the increased read speed, then that's just a waste of drives.

It does (sortof) decrease my risk as I would need 3 drives out of any set of 3 to fail. I understand this looks like overkill. It also helps on read speed. Prior to this array I was using 36 600GB 15K SCSI. My goal was similar speed + safer setup + bigger volume. The difference in cost between using raid 10 & 10 ADM using 3TB drives is only about $2,000.

@scottalanmiller said in Safe to have a 48TB Windows volume?:

But it is darn close when using triple mirroring!

FWIW - you're the reason I migrated to Raid 10 off of my Raid 6 / 36 drive setup. Lots of yelling at me on Spiceworks a few years ago about how raid 6 isn't safe for huge arrays

@PhlipElder said in Safe to have a 48TB Windows volume?:

What's the air-gap to protect against an encryption event if any?

What's the air-gap to protect against an encryption event if any?

My backup server has access to the rest of the network - but it pulls the backups to itself vs backups being pushed. The rest of the network can't directly write to it. My backups happen weekly - so my (hope) is that I would recognize what was happening to my live network before it was backed up.

I have been contemplating doubling my backup storage space to make sure I have enough space to store older file revisions in a ransomware situation.