I have a 30 TB Synology setup, a by product of needing to establish an offline backup storage that lived in my house, outside of failure potentials in the cloud.
My backup system consists of Synology and Dropbox, and that’s about it. And the other day, as my computer was imploding, I managed to use Time Machine for the very first time and surprise, surprise, it actually worked really well! As I investigated further, down the rabbit hole I went. I found out that you can use network attached storage in order to backup time machine to it!
But I’m about 5% away from filling up my 30 terabyte drive, which is insane. And I know I have to trim back all this crazy amount of files.
So I purchased a 22 TB Synology desktop backup drive which was at a reasonable price per terabyte ($11.36/tb!). You can see those prices here on diskprices.com site that I found on Hacker News, a no nonsense database of the cheapest drives on the net.
I plugged it into my Synology directly via its USB 3.0 front port, and now I am manually transferring 12 TB of data to archive semi-permanently.
I know, I know. There are questions about resilience and long term efficacy and backup integrity and testing your backups and all that other jazz. I am building myself up to this methodology one step at a time!
In the meantime, I have a single laser-focused goal: free up space on my Synology. Rather than trying to buy my way into making more space with larger hard drives, I need to control my budget.
So here I am, cleaning up my pack rat life.
And this backup is taking so long.
It’s actually gonna take twelve hours to copy it all over. Which sounds pretty reasonable until you realize that SSDs nowadays can do up to 5000/mb per second. Here is a cute table that shows a comparison:
Transfer Speed Comparison for 12TB Data
| Drive Type | Transfer Speed | Time (Hours) | Time (Minutes) | Speed Improvement |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Current USB 3.0 Drive | 280 MBps | 11.9 hours | 714 minutes | Baseline |
| Entry SSD | 1,000 MBps | 3.3 hours | 200 minutes | 3.6x faster |
| Mid-range SSD | 2,000 MBps | 1.7 hours | 100 minutes | 7.1x faster |
| High-end SSD | 4,000 MBps | 0.8 hours | 50 minutes | 14.3x faster |
We are truly living in an age of speed abundance. I can’t wait for the day when I can get an SSD that can fit 20 terabytes at a reasonable price and fits in the size of my palm. Until then, the old spinning platters are the way to go.
Remember, back up your data! Yesterday was the best time to do that. Today is the second best time 🙂