Wanted: Home Media Server solution for normal people
For the past several years I’ve strung together multiple drives off a Mac to serve as a repository of all of our digital crap (music, movies, photos, miscellaneous other stuff). Maybe five years ago I started using a RAID setup relying on the Mac's built-in software RAID setup.
I've alternated between three pairs of RAID arrays (one for music, one for "other" and one for movies) and my current two pair set up (music + video on one, "projects" on the other).
As I was walking out the door (figuratively) to go on vacation this morning, one of the slices failed on the music + movies array. There's 600Gb of mostly music (and yes, RIAA, mostly legal) and some movies. While the other slice was functioning, I didn't want to leave and come back to having lost the whole smash.
So, I'm first copying off all of the data to a spare 1Tb drive, and then rebuilding the array.
And here's the thing, I have no idea what will happen.
This one time? At band camp? Sorry… but this one time I rebuilt a slice and the system chugged along and I discovered much to my chagrin that I had an empty 200Mb RAID setup, the software having delicately erased everything before rebuilding the array. I'd prefer that not to happen, but there's so little transparency as to what will happen that I'm resorting to copying everything multiple times before trying the rebuild.
There's got to be an easier way.
I know of the Drobo but haven't had time to look into it. My preference is for something that just handles this shit. Tell me when I need to slap another drive in, that's fine, but I don't want to lose anything, and I don't want to have to think about it anymore.
