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Bulk Data Storage For The Common Man?
Vigyaan writes "Lately, I have been looking into different bulk data storage options available to a common man. My work
depends on generating, storing and analyzing a
large amount of data -- averaging about 1 TB per
month. I would like to have a storage system which is automated, fast, reliable
and most importantly does not cost the price of an
eye. Right now, I have a 4 node Linux cluster with
10 large hard disks (total capacity 1.6 TB); data storage roughly costs
about $0.60/GB (excluding the cost of PC
hardware). But long term storage is painful -- DVDs
cost about $0.10-$0.15/GB but takes too much human time
and leaving data on hard disks makes me nervous
because of possible failures. RAID is a possibility, but it increases the cost significantly. I was wondering, if
Slashdot readers have any recommendations for a
cheap automated way to store and retrieve data."
Blu ray based dvd burners.
Those will be sweet =)
The sea changes color, but the sea does not change.
For long term storage, how do you feel about firewire drives? Maybe not as cheap as you'd like, but you can get them in >160 gig flavors, plus you can hook them up to just about anything. Once you do the backup, which'd be a simple copy and paste, you can just unplug the drive and store it in a safe or something.
Again, I'm not sure if that's as cheap as you'd want, but that's a solution I came up with for a similar problem. My company's going to be 3D rendering some stuff that could end up eating 50 megabytes a frame. (Extra data is stored for future refinement... I can go into detail if I've piqued anybody's curiosity.) We can't afford to lose this data, so the Firewire drive approach is what we're considering right now.
"Derp de derp."
Depending on your budget, the appropriate thing to do may be to get an automated DVD burning system to do scheduled incremental backups in duplicate. We used to do that with CDs at an ISP I used to work at. It's unfortunately difficult to search for while not getting people pirating movies, but this is the first thing I found on Google; doubtless there's better out there.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
We're dealing with storage issues right now at work, and what we're doing is buying a server with 8x250 GB SATA drives. We then run the drives in raid 5, so we have 1.75TB of storage space (unformatted). Including computer costs, it's running us about $2.50 per GB, but it's a very beefy 3u server. For backup, we're currently backing up to tape. That costs us under $0.50 per GB with ultrium tapes. For some of our data, we've been backing up to DVD's, but we've pretty much given up on that. In the long run, it's not worth it.
Depending on how you do it, you can get a lot more than the density that you assume. Check out www.paperdisk.com.
That said, this method would still be more than twice as expensive as storing data on hard drives, would still require a million pages, but would take a little under 2 weeks to print.
It still doesn't seem like a feasible option.
The up-side is that, if stored properly, the data would likely be safe potentially for many hundreds of years.