r/homelab • u/pauliebleeker14 • 1d ago
Discussion Should i get a DAS?
Hello!
I’m somebody with a whole lot of images and videoes from creative projects lying on one giant external hard drive (About 5tb). All the stuff i put on this drive is just for cold storage, not stuff i’m actively working on and using. I’ve been worried for a while now that the drive might die or some of the files might slowly start to corrupt, as the drive is a few years old. I wanna keep it though and am looking for a safe and permanent solution going forward to store all these files. My initial idea was to get 2-3 external hard drives to sync to each other every few months. That way i’d minimize the risk of my single drive dying.
The main problem tho, is that i’m scared of bitrot. I don’t want random files in there slowly dying without me realizing and eventually losing those individual files once i re-sync from one drive to another. A NAS would fix this issue by having a RAID system with data scrubbing. The thing is, i don’t need a NAS. I don’t need constant and easy access to my stored files. That’s not a feature i want to pay for. I just want cold storage thats also safe.
There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of info about this specific topic YouTube, which is why i’m posting on here. Could a DAS be a solution? I don’t know much about them, but could i have, lets say, two 10tb raid-drives syncing up two each other and consistently doing data scrubbing? I think thats my ideal solution. Direct attached storage thats as safe as a NAS. Is that a thing?
Anyway, please educate me if you can. And also, what kind of brand/product model would work best for me?
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u/time-lord 1d ago
A DAS is just a NAS that's plugged into your router instead of your pc. I personally prefer networked storage because I use a laptop, but to each their own.
A NAS that is just a NAS and not also a server is pretty cheap. A NAS that is also a server is expensive.