rodeoboy wrote:
I would think using some sort of raid 1 or 5 setup would be best for you. Like they said SSD are very expensive and like all things, they can fail too.
Might I suggest a Buffalo Links station. We have 2 of them for datastores. Since the data is not that crucial, we only run a Raid 1 with Hot Swappable drives. But they do sell larger units as well. They are very easy to setup and seem to perform well. There also other brands that do the same thing.
If your files are extremely valuable, you could buy an removable sata device like a Removable SATA hard drive bay and do backups to the drive and take them offsite to a bank vault like I do.
Just some thoughts.
Rodeoboy
We have a winner!
What the OPis looking for is a very large RELIABLE drive ARRAY.
SSDs are not 100% reliable.. Folks assume since there is no moving parts that it will not fail.. Simply not true, in fact you can very easily damage a SSD drive by constantly reading/writing to the same memory locations. While they have improved the reliability factor they are still very expensive when it comes to space.
SSDs are really best for use as OS startup drives at this point in time, perhaps a few more years and that will change.
For large storage space it is very hard to beat the cost and reliability of spinning media.
Put three HDs into a RAID 5 array and you net a very large amount of drive space with the added feature of redundancy. In a RAID 5 array you can have one drive fail and never lose any data. Add in a 4th drive for a hot spare and the array will automatically replace the failed drive with the hot spare.
If you don't wish to spend the money on a good quality RAID 5 (and higher) controller card then perhaps look into a NAS (Network Attached Storage) drive system. Basically in a nutshell a NAS is a purpose built "fileserver" in a box which you can setup to handle two drives in a RAID 1 (Mirrored Pair) setup and some NAS units offer RAID 5 and above.
In a mirrored pair the same data is written to BOTH drives and if one fails the other drive will contain a copy of same data.
NAS units can be had with or without drives (without drives allows you add your own drives). NAS without drives start around $100 and NAS with drives start at $200 and up.
Contrast that to one 500 gig SSD drive will set you back about $200 and has no redundancy!
Just remember, the larger the drive the MORE data you can lose if it fails.
On edit, forgot to add a link to NAS units..
HERE