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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?"

1 of 574 comments (clear)

  1. 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 :-)