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Terabyte Storage Solutions?

Posted by Cliff on from the large-arrays-of-fat-disks dept.

DeMechman asks: "As many on Slashdot may know, storage is one thing which you can never have enough of. Given the current situation with CD/DVD rot (Personally I can attest to a 10% attrition rate) hard drives in a RAID configuration seem to be a better and more economical solution. If you own more than fifty CD/DVDs, it can be a daunting task to find a file. I am wondering if anyone has found a hardware solution that can inexpensively be set up to handle 10 or more 250GB HDDs in a RAID configuration. Primarily, has any case manufacturer tackled this niche market yet?"

3 of 574 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What's "inexpensively"? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    "If you own more than fifty CD/DVDs, it can be a daunting task to find a file."

    What's wrong with this statement that it invites derisive (if informative) giggles? I don't think the author has just 50, it's just that over 50 and finding files becomes more of a task. I'm sure some good file management databases are in order, but anyway optical disc media sure seems to fail a lot more than makes it safe for easy backup.

    I have 1.5 Terabytes of personally collected data and I don't understand what's wrong with being curious about solutions over 2 TB.

    Perhaps the biggest problem in true data backup is getting reliable and redundant copies off site and off the power grid. Certainly power spikes can be protected against and quality power supplies can be used, but if there's a problem with a power supply it could cause loss of data on all hard drives in one box all at once. Tape backups and optical media doesn't always work upon a restore attempt.

    I can't wait for carbon rods.

  2. Re:It's not RAID, but ... by Epistax · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Ah this is when their terminology really starts hurting us.

    1 terabyte = 1,000,000,000,000 bytes

    Try 1024^4 = 1,099,511,627,776.. wait, where'd my 100 gigs go?

    Due to the exponential nature this little white lie hurts a bit more for every increment, here sacrificing just about 10% of the storage. I'm surprised they don't say 1000 gigs just to dodge the 10% mark.

    For those who insist that tera means one trillon for bytes, I reference
    Here, here , here, here, here, and how about here. Now I'll admit the wikipedia entry has the trillion byte definition, but they basically said it is used in storage advertising.

  3. Re:What's "inexpensively"? by gujo-odori · · Score: 4, Insightful

    UPSes and redundant power supplies are great, but as the grandparent metioned, a bad power supply can corrupt your data. That's true even in a redundant-power machine.

    A friend of mine once lost all the data on two drives (RAID 1) in a country with extremely reliable power (Japan; even during typhoons I never once had a power outage in 8 years) when the UPS suddenly died one day and dumped the whole battery load into the computer. The white smoke escaped from everything.

    If your data is really valuable, offline storage is not a luxury, it's a necessity. Get a DLT drive (or a changer, if you can afford it). Offsite is easy. Keep at least one backup set at your office. If your house burns down, you're covered. If something so bad happens that it destroys both your house and your office, you have bigger problems than the lost data :-)