Advice - WD Elements vs WD My Book

[Anthropy]

I'm revamping my backup scenario. I think I'll get a 16TB or so external drive connected to our Comcast modem/router. All our computers, phones, and tablets are Macintosh, and soon to all be Silicon.
(BTW, I will have all my DP project and sample drives backed up to 1:1 HD mirrors as well, and our startup drives and iPhone backups to iCloud)
Help me here:
1- I don't think I need an NAS for this - we'll just store all our photos and backups in our respective folders. Make sense? Any advantage to a much more expensive NAS?

2-I'm looking at one of these. Is there an advantage or disadvantage for either?
https://www.westerndigital.com/products ... 60HBK-NESN
or
https://www.westerndigital.com/products ... 60HBK-NESN

3- Can anyone suggest a better alternative? as to drives, cloud storage, and general procedure?

Thanks James and all, I painfully miss seeing you at NAMM. Perhaps 2025.
Robert Watson - aka Anthropy

[mikehalloran]

I do not use NAS but I do use NAS boxes because I can connect them to my router over Ethernet. Since I have my house wired, I can place them anywhere.

I get these empty and fill them with a pair of drives configured RAID 0. They are a lot faster with a pair of 8TB than a single 16TB HDD.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01AWH05KK?re ... tails&th=1

For the empty version, select then look at Buying Options. I prefer new but they have used available as well.

WD supports Time Machine right out of the box and I found it easy to configure through my browser—phone support is available if you need it (registration never seems to work so I phone that in). Each box will have its own tab in your browser (Support can help with that, too). Once done, you format the drive and set its password in Airport Utility.app (in your Utilities Folder). You set encryption in Time Machine.

I do not believe in having one TM backup and let them rotate through hourly. All 6 Macs back up to a pair of them and a third will be joining them next week.

Yes, if you lose one drive in a RAID 0 array, you've lost the backup, the same is true if you have a single drive and lose it.

[Anthropy]

Thanks Mike, you have an Interesting setup.

I put together ~ pricing:
$200 WD Diskless My Cloud EX2 Ultra NAS
$500 for two 8tb Western Digital 8TB WD Gold Enterprise Class Internal Hard Drives
$700 total
vs:
$265 WD Elements 16tb single drive

NAS has Ethernet, I know. And RAID 0 is fast.
My Cloud is USB3, which is slower than Ethernet and isn't a fast RAID.

Am I looking at the main difference?

Thanks,
Robert

[mikehalloran]

$500 for a pair of WD Gold 8TB is $100 more than one can find on Amazon but I understand your point. I'm of the opinion that "enterprise class" HDDs are overkill for Time Machine where, depending on the number of units, they run once every hour, two or three.

I use the WD Red+ They're slower, quiet, run cool and have a 3 yr guarantee.

https://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital- ... r_1_1?th=1

Speed is of no importance when backing up. Having to do a full restore can be quite painful if you are unlucky enough to have to do so. RAID 0 cuts the time in half. Apple Support once had me wipe and restore a 4TB System drive to solve a problem (it didn't—they guessed wrong). The restore took about 36 hours. After I got my M2 Studio up and running, I decided to wipe my iMac Pro and restore from my current setup and timed it at 17 hours (I get curious and the buyer wasn't going to be in town till the following week).

So, while I certainly understand costs and like to save money as much as anyone, my purchasing decisions are always tempered by asking what my time (and data) is worth.

[Anthropy]

Well said - all good things to consider. I like the way you think.
What on earth is this? It can't be legit:
https://store.colecramer.us/product/wd- ... 1aae00afac

One issue I have is noise. I have some HDD enclosures that sound like dentist drills, and some that are completely quiet.

[bayswater]

Having to do a full restore can be quite painful if you are unlucky enough to have to do so.

That’s my tale of woe. I recently did a full restore, less user files. It took 5 days. I could have bought a slightly newer Mac than the one I was trying to fix for C$199, and that was a real temptation.

[Anthropy]

I think where I'm landing with this is to buy the least expensive reliable 16tb backup system I can, hopefully spending less than $300.
When I can afford a fast and big NAS RAID 1. I'm much more interested in data protection than restore speed. I suppose I may feel different if I have a catastrophic failure, but hopefully redundancy will mitigate that, as I'll have separate, smaller backup drives for each of Startup (which will also be backed up to iCloud), Projects (also backed up to Dropbox), and each of 4 sample drives,
Each drive will have all of it's data on 3 drives, and two of them will also have cloud backup.

Thanks all,
Robert