[s-cars] NAC- need advice on photo workstation, RAID and some other ???s

[Taka Mizutani]

Are you talking about RAID off a MB or using a dedicated controller card?

I was going with a fairly high-end controller card (for a workstation) to
maximize
reliability. I'm wondering if going with Adaptec would be safer than Areca,
which is
not the same size of company.

I'm running Win XP Pro SP2. No wireless networks, but I could easily network
to a
second PC via a 100MBs switch. These a RAW photo files, maybe 20MB each, but
will eventually number into the thousands. That's the problem- manual
backups are
fine with small chunks of data, but when you are talking about hundreds of
GBs,
that DVD backup won't cut it.

I'm looking toward the future as well- that's why RAID and tape backups are
really the
only thing I can see that will scale well when I'm talking about a potential
2TB setup in
a few years. Even tape doesn't have the density that I'd really want- the
affordable systems
max out around 200GB per tape and I'm not able to buy nor do I really want
an autoloader.

Taka


On 6/10/06, Kent McLean <kentmclean at mindspring.com> wrote:
>
> Taka Mizutani wrote:
> > I'm building a dedicated photo workstation for maximum reliability
> > and redundancy so as to avert any potential data loss. However,
> > I have to do this in a reasonable budget, so I can't afford to drop
> > multi thousands on this setup.
>
> I may be wrong, but...  I haved heard horror stories about RAID
> setups where data got corrupted on the first drive, and it was
> copied that way to the redundent drives, destroying what had
> been good data.
>
> If it were me,  I'd rely on frequent manual backups.  I'd just copy
> the work data to a second drive in the PC after every session.
> I'd also get a removable (USB/Firewire) drive and copy to that,
> too, then store that drive off-site.  And to make sure that a stray
> magnet or flood doesn't screw up the drives, I'd burn the data
> to DVD(s) on a regular (weekly, monthly) basis, and store those
> off-site.
>
> That's my two cents, and worth every penny.
>
> Some questions that didn' arise:  what OS are you using?
> Do you have a wireless network to back-up to a 2nd PC?
> How much data are you talking about?  Some ISPs provide
> lots of storage for little money (easy access and off-site).
>
> --
> Kent McLean
> '94 100 S Avant, "Moody"
> '89 200 TQ, "Bad Puppy" up in smoke
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