I am a photographer attempting to find a file storage solution for our photo studio. We are a young studio with only 3TB of data, but we are growing at about 2TB per year. All of our data is currently stored on a single 5TB external drive backed up in the cloud to Backblaze.
I would really like to get a more robust on-site backup solution that enables us to expand our storage seamlessly and recover from a drive failure without any data loss. I am trying to figure out the hardware costs of building my own system vs. buying something off the rack.
Are you able to hot swap failed drives with unRAID like you can with Drobo? How easy is it to add new drives into the array, and how much space is available for data vs. redundancy?
What is the file transfer like for users on OSX? Does the system mount like a single external drive or do I need some kind of file transfer software?
What kind of hardware requirements do I need to worry about getting started with? Is 8GB of RAM enough? Do I need EEC RAM?
What's the minimum CPU I can get away with if I'm just using this for archival photo storage and the occasional transfer?
After setting up the system, can I just plug it into my router to get access to it over the network? Can I also plug into it directly for faster transfers?
Is it possible to setup access via the internet so that I can access files remotely?
Besides individual drive failures, is there anything else I need to worry about that could cause data loss? If one of the other components dies (motherboard, cpu, flash storage with OS), can I just rebuild the system without any data loss?
Thanks so much for your help. I'm still pretty early in the process of trying to figure out which solution makes the most sense for our needs but from what I've been reading unRAID sounds like a pretty perfect fit. Any tips or advice is great appreciated!