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

[Joe Pizzimenti]

Don't forget that when buying your drives to get drives from different
manufacturers.  Less of a chance of simultaneous failure.

On 6/13/06, Taka Mizutani <t44tqtro at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 6/12/06, Theodore Chen <tedebearp at yahoo.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > --- Taka Mizutani <t44tqtro at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > The reason for the RAID array is also for future expandability- I do
> > foresee
> > > hitting that 2Tb limit eventually.
> >
> > wow, that's a big home data center.  there was a time when you had to
> buy
> > gigantic storage machines from IBM to store that kind of data.  now you
> > can
> > get 2TB for $800 (4 x 500GB HDs at $200 each).
>
>
> Well, figure a 5400dpi film scanner will put out easy 20MB individual
> files,
> I've got probably a good few hundred rolls of film to scan and restore
> digitally.
>
> I've also got several GB of digital photos as well. A few hundred Gb will
> go
> away pretty fast, I think.
>
> I was getting 320GB HDs for $100 each, will be about $120 now (that deal
> went away). Makes for over 2TB for $700. The 500GB drives are rather
> expensive IMO, still, esp. in SATA flavor.
>
> however, if you want to add more drives, i think you'll have to add
> > them as a group of 3 or 4 - same size as your initial group, configured
> > so that you effectively make each of the original drives bigger, and
> > it won't have the performance of an 8 drive array.  otherwise, you have
> > to rebuild the volume and recalculate all the parities.  it probably
> > depends on the features in your controller, but i don't think adding
> more
> > capacity to an existing RAID array is as simple as plugging in a new
> > drive.
>
>
> I know that adding drives will require a rebuild, but the Promise and
> Areca
> controllers  allow for a hot rebuild, hot swap, can do most functions on
> the
> fly. Expansion is also available hot.
>
> RAID 6 is overkill, IMHO.  you're going to take two drives for parity
> > instead of just one as with RAID 5, and i don't think you're going to
> > get much additional protection over a RAID 5 with Retrospect backups.
> > RAID 6 guards against double disk failure, which is much less likely
> > when you have a relatively small number of disks.  if you were going to
> > run a 1000-disk farm, i could see using RAID 6, but you're talking about
> > single digit numbers of disks.  it's hugely inefficient unless you have
> > a large number of disks.
>
>
> Point taken on the RAID 6- I'll just run a 4 drive RAID 5 with maybe a hot
> spare.
>
> Taka
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