Desktop vs Enterpise sata drives

[Giacomo_N]

Hi guys,

I'm evaluating Veeam backup and N°2 NAS Qnap 12 bay repository for off-site backup copy.
I don't know the difference of enterprise sata instead desktop sata, the price difference is high, but is it necessary for that purpose ?


Thanks in advance

[ZachW]

I would definitely say that it is worth it to go for enterprise drives for your backup storage. I find that A LOT of admins will skimp on their storage, but I find this to be an awful aspect to DR as your backups are quite important and of course from this where your store your backups is quite important as well.. A couple of points:

1. Enterprise drives first of all are going to go through much more testing and because of this will typically have much better reliability than consumer drives.
2. Enterprise drives are typically going to be aimed for being used in a RAID configuration and from this are built in this fashion.
3. Enterprise drives will usually have some sort of Vibration Protection technology implemented ( if you run through newegg I can guarantee almost all enterprise drives will be marketed with this ).
4. Keep in mind that enterprise drives are going to be aimed more towards a "busy in one way or another 100% of the time" and higher availability will typically be found due to this.
5. Enterprise drives are typically going to be built to support faster data input/retrieval ( this could cut down on your backup/restore times in comparision to consumer drives ).

This is obviously an extremely high-level explanation, as I am about to wind down for the night.. But this should at least point you in the right direction.

[Yuki]

with QNAP you want to:
1- get the drives from the compatibility list
2 - drives with TLER
3 - only use QNAP either for smaller backup jobs or not do reverse incremental/synthetic fulls (with with forward and active fulls)

[Giacomo_N]

Thank you Zachw for the exaustive answers, finally my choice is enterprise Sata.

Yuky, yes, i know and i'm not sure for Qnap, i've also get a quote for X2 12bay supermicro server: xeon quad code, lsi controller and 16 gb RAM at the same price of qnap, but the idea to manage other two physical servers with licenses, Windows update, antivirus, etc..isn't the best..

[Yuki]

You don't really have to. SuperMicro can be identical to QNAP in functionality. Since QNAP can't run Veeam server/proxy roles and can only act as network storage, you could install FreeNAS or any Linux distro for that matter as long as your server parts are on the compatibility list. Then just expose the storage as NFS, iSCSI, SMB.

On the other hand if you want to optimize the use of that server, i would put Windows 7 or 8 and use it as target proxy and datastore at the same time. That would cost only about $150 in windows license, but you would still need to manage windows updates and AV on it.

To be honest - the headache of backups not completing on time due to slow storage is a lot bigger than managing an additional windows host (especially in corporate environment with AD and group policies).

[tsightler]

you could install....any Linux distro for that matter as long as your server parts are on the compatibility list. Then just expose the storage as NFS, iSCSI, SMB.

If you use Linux I wouldn't suggest presenting as NFS/iSCSI/SMB since Veeam supports Linux repositories directly with a local Veeam agent.