Storage

[ChrisDauer]

I've heard a few people talk about storage and I'm about to jump into that arena myself.

So I have a few options.

1.) Cost: $.4 Raid 1 (mirror - size unknown but half that of stripe), $.2 Raid 0 (stripe - between 400 GB and 1 TB; whatever is on sale). Buy individual drives and manage Mirroring on my own (ie, copy to each). This option is cheapest, and biggest PITA. I must copy first to one drive then when that finished, repeat the process to a second drive.

2.) Cost: $.6 Raid 1 (mirror - 1 TB), $.3 Raid 0 (stripe - 2 TB). Buy a raid unit w/ 2 drives having 1 TB each and go Raid 1 (mirror). The cost is a bit more but I do not have to manually copy to each drive.

3.) Cost: $.45 Raid 5 (1.5 TB), $.67 Raid 1 (mirror - 1 TB), $.33 Raid 0 (stripe - 2 TB). Buy a raid unit w/ 4 drives having 500 GB (.5 TB) and go Raid 5. It should yield improved performance and still provide data redundancy (if a single drive fails.)

So far, I'm leaning most towards option 3, (Raid 5). I get redundancy like Raid 1 but with more drive space and improved performance.

Thoughts, comments, other? What do you guys use?


Ps. Yes, I know that this doesn't cover fire, or theft, etc. When (if!) I start making money on this venture, I'll be sure to keep important images off-site. Until then; I'm just going to have to risk it.

-------------------
*mirror - duplicate information on multiple (generally 2) disc drives (like a mirror copy).
*stripe - information is written to two hard drives at the same time so that each drive only has to write half the information (like having 2 water faucets to fill two buckets. It will take only half the time). Improved performance is off-set by the fact that losing one drive will result in the complete loss of the image.
*Raid 5 - Uses a checksum bit to validate so that if any one drive fails, it can be rebuild by inserting a working hard drive. It's also spread over multiple drives which should improve performance (in theory, there are always exceptions).

 

[Jack]

It's a tough call. With R5, you get redundancy, but are hosed if two drives fail relatively close together. You could R5 - 1, which is double reduntdant, and likly the most secure, but also costly. I opted for R1-1-1 --- yes, triple redundancy, but only for the current years files. I keep historical years R1-1. It is slower more costly than R5 but essentially as secure as R5-1 whiel being less costly. So in the end, I give up some write speed, which IMO is no big deal in my applications. BTW, I'm migrating from 500G drives to 1T drives here in the near future.

Jack

 

[ChrisDauer]

Some interesting and good points, thanks Jack!

How many current GB/TB are you using and in which configurations? Like 500GB/500GB/500GB (for current stuff) and 1 TB/1 TB for historical? Or what?


1.5 TB should hold me for a very long time. I'll be starting w/ a base around 300 GB, and adding the 50 GB I have from New Zealand (well, I may only save around 30 GB or so, we'll see).

I thought about getting 1 TB drives, but I think it may be overkill. I want to balance the need to not upgrade within a month (hassle factor) with not needing to upgrade for 10 years (overspending on ever falling costs). So basically, I SHOULD need to upgrade between a couple to a few years from now (with costs of 5 TB drives dropping to a nice level when I do my next upgrade

Personally, I really wish the unit had 5 drives, so I could have 1.5 TB and run it with 2 parity drives. But it doesn't and breaking the norm increases price significantly.

Not that it matters; but my current desktop is running dual 160 GB drives in Raid 1; so critical works go there. Of which I have surprisingly few At least for now...

And unlike Jack, I hope to hold off getting a new computer for another 6 months - 1 year (hopefully in that time, Tiny$oft will have have become Smarter$oft and fixed Vista. Without question, none of Apples marketing campaigns have been as effective at converting PC users to Mac users, as Vista has.

 

[Jack]

Currently, my historical images only take up about 1T (2@500G), and I have that mirrored to another offsite 1T, also 2@500G. My current files are on a 500G mirrored to another 500G, then mirrored to a third offsite 500G, which gets updated monthly or after a large shoot. Any file deletes are NOT mirrored for safety. So I currently have two full copies of my historical images, and three copies of my "working" drive files. I am going to migrate the offsite drive to a 2T NAS box (no raid) and network the offsite mirroring so I don't have to do it manually.

 

[ChrisDauer]

My 2 TB (1.5 usable) Raid 5 array just arrived! Looking forward to plugging it all in tonight!

Space. The Final Frontier. These are the ...

 

[cmb_]

Chris,

What did you get? I Have been looking at the G-Technology G-Speed eS. I will need to add more storage soon and I was thinking of 1 or 2 TB G-Speed eS. Not sure yet.

 

[ChrisDauer]

Chris,
What did you get?

I got a Cavalry 4 disc (500GB), Raid 5 (1.5TB usable) array with eSataII card and cable. The part number is: CADA002SA4. The price was pretty good so I went with it. I'll post in a week or so after I've used it a bit.