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Data Storage

Data Storage For Home? 114

Posted by Cliff from the hard-drives-outstripping-backup-capacity dept.
kuom asks: "Every couple of years, I face the same problem: running out of hard drive space. No matter how big of a hard drive I get, I seem to find ways to fill it up within a few months. The size of my hard drive grew from 2.5G to 13G, to 20G, to 40G, 80G, 120G, and most recently, 200G. Today, I have a combined hard drive space of 280G, but I again find that I only have about 2G of free space left. My collection of family photos, web site content, TV episode captures, music files, and my archive of ISO files for various operating systems, they just eat up my hard drive space so fast. I could get a 400G hard drive, but I figure maybe it's time to think about something long term, something like EtherDrive or StorageWare. But the price tags are definitely out of my range. Slashdot readers, what do you suggest for home data storage?"
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Data Storage For Home? More

Data Storage For Home?

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  • DVD (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Planesdragon ( 210349 ) <<su.enotsleetseltsac> <ta> <todhsals>> on Saturday September 24, 2005 @11:25PM (#13642184) Homepage Journal
    Your solution is to move things off of a hard drive. Correct. But you don't need a long-term professional solution--especially not when there's a long-term (or, if you want to be anal, medium-term) archival technology already tasked for the home.

    Spend $100 and get yourself a DVD burner. Don't just use it for backup, but actually move things that you don't reference all the time--ESPECIALLY those ISOs you almost certainly don't need live--off of the live storage. For things that are important / irreplacable, make several copies. Distribute them far and wide to friends and family if you want.

    • Re:DVD (Score:4, Informative)

      by rincebrain ( 776480 ) on Sunday September 25, 2005 @12:25AM (#13642431) Homepage
      $100!? $40 nets you a nice one off Newegg. Dual layer, too. [newegg.com]
      • Dual layer, too.
        Of course, dual layer media costs about 10x as much as single layer media.

        Stick with the single layer media, even if your DVD drive is dual layer, unless you've got something that needs to be on one DVD.

    • Re:DVD (Score:3, Informative)

      by Reg Nullify ( 917553 )
      Just don't use a sharpie pen to write labels on your disks. I did this on some CD-ROMs I used to backup some digital video and 2 years later the disk was badly corrupted. When you write on the silvery label you're actually writing on the back of the recording medium. The solvents from the sharpie leak right through the thin layer and corrupt the data. Printing out labels or using a special pen made for labeling CD's and keeping the Cd's out of the sun will help the data remain secure.

      • Re:DVD (Score:3, Informative)

        by Pete (big-pete) ( 253496 ) *

        When you write on the silvery label you're actually writing on the back of the recording medium. The solvents from the sharpie leak right through the thin layer and corrupt the data. Printing out labels or using a special pen made for labeling CD's and keeping the Cd's out of the sun will help the data remain secure.

        Labels can be bad too. [techbuilder.org]

        There are also some other good tips for archiving CD/DVD type media in that article.

        -- Pete.

        • Re:DVD (Score:4, Interesting)

          by grondu ( 239962 ) on Sunday September 25, 2005 @06:55AM (#13643475)
          Labels can be bad too.

          This is true. I had several CDs I had burned a few years ago that were unreadable. I removed the labels by soaking the disc in isopropyl alcohol and after that, I had no problem reading the discs.

          • Re:DVD (Score:1, Funny)

            by Anonymous Coward
            I removed the labels by soaking the disc in isopropyl alcohol and after that, I had no problem reading the discs.

            Next time, try putting the labels on the other side of the disc...

        • Re:DVD (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Phreakiture ( 547094 ) on Monday September 26, 2005 @08:48AM (#13649771) Homepage

          When you write on the silvery label you're actually writing on the back of the recording medium.

          Of CDs: true. Of DVDs: False. DVDs sandwich the recording medium between two layers of substrate, rather than having it sprayed on the one side of the disc. This has several benefits:

          • You can't scratch the data off of the disc accidentally (you can scratch the disc, but the data is still there and can be rescued)
          • You can create 2 sided discs (can't do that with a CD, because the focal point of the laser will be wrong)
          • Solvent properties of labeling materials won't directly affect the data layer. They can dig into the substrate a bit, but have to dig really deep to get to the data. (On a side note, I have at least two commercially-recorded CDs that have gone bad because the black paint used in labelling them cut through to the aluminum reflective layer. Such a thing would be far less likely on a DVD.)

          On labels, we have a problem here at my workplace in that we receive data from a certain other department on DVD. Regulations require that the DVD be labelled in a particular fashion (doesn't say use a label, does say $wordy_legal_boilerplate must appear on the disc) and the other department refuses to cease using sticky labels to do this. Our department all use laptop computers (because we all have to work weekends from home occasionally) and the sticky label causes the disc to warp slightly as it heats up in our machines, thus causing it to stop being legible after about 15 minutes unless you keep it 100% spun up the entire time. Labels on optical discs are evil

      • Re:DVD (Score:3, Informative)

        by TeknoHog ( 164938 )
        When you write on the silvery label you're actually writing on the back of the recording medium. The solvents from the sharpie leak right through the thin layer and corrupt the data.

        This is true for CDs, but not DVDs. They have the data layer in the middle of the plastic bulk, whereas CDs have it on the label-side surface.

        You can see this clearly if you microwave coasters of each :) The shiny layer of CDs begins to strip away, whereas that of DVDs stays inside the plastic.

      • Uh oh. I've got about 250 DVDs all of which are marked with either a red magic marker or a black laundry marker.

        Welp, guess I better be looking into getting the good stuff back off of them.

    • Re:DVD (Score:4, Funny)

      by fm6 ( 162816 ) on Sunday September 25, 2005 @01:14AM (#13642663) Homepage Journal
      You're right, of course. But that leads us to our next Ask Slashdot: "I have hundreds of data DVDs witch all kinds of shit on them. I can never find the one I want. How do I keep track?"
      • Each CD here, except for one's burnt from ISO's such as the various *nix distro's, has a catalog. I create it by dumping the output of a recursive dir or ls -s to a file, fill out the rest of the line with a short description and tuck it into a file with the CD or DVD (I used DVD's now) title. Heck, this is so blindingly obvious it falls into the "well, duh!" category. I've been doing this since the early days of CompuServe as I was a librarian for numerous fora almost from the beginning. Even CompuServ
      • DiscLib [lyrasoftware.com] works great for this, at least in Windows, and it's free to boot!
    • It's a horrible pain in the ass to keep anything archived on DVD. 4GB just isn't very much space these days. They take far too long to make (around 4 minutes, even at 16x, which is too short to really be able to do anything else, and too long to sit and watch over and over and over) and media quality can be a real gamble, even with top-tier stuff. Plus, that leads to problems in organizing hundreds of DVDs, which is its own yucky problem.

      • 4GB just isn't very much space these days.

        4 GB is half the size of some folk's entire hard drive. It should be more than enough to back up your entire OS, possibly your entire "bin" directory if you keep your PC neat.

        But you're right. A more serious/lazy/gadget-happy geek would be better served buying either a 200 GB portable HDD or a tape backup system in addition to the DVD burner. Both of the previous have the problem in that they simply don't work for offline data archival--it's not their intended p

      • "It's a horrible pain in the ass to keep anything archived on DVD."

        No shit. I can't believe someone seriously gave that advice, and actually got modded up for it. The man has 280 GB of data and is considering getting another 400GB hard drive. Somehow I don't think DVD's are going to cut it.

        What he needs (and what I need too, for that matter) is cheap network attached storage for the home, but unfortunately I haven't been able to find such a product so far. I hope some manufacturer realizes the deman

  • I know several people personally who have had success with the MacGurus 'Burly Box', you can do up to 1.2TB (RAID 5) for around $1500. See the following URL:

    http://macgurus.com/productpages/sata/sataguide_1. php [macgurus.com]

    The 'product page' is at http://macgurus.com/productpages/sata/satakits.php [macgurus.com]

  • Prioritize what you absolutely need (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tomlouie ( 264519 ) on Saturday September 24, 2005 @11:39PM (#13642249)
    Replace "hard drive storage" with "space in my home", and you'll see that it's not a matter of getting enough space to store all your stuff, it's a matter of deciding what's important to you that needs to be kept.

    Where it's electronic bits or physical items, some things are more important to you than others. Take a long hard look at what things you absolutely need, and toss the rest. Will your life be that must worse if you didn't have "______" within easy reach at any given moment? Probably not. And you'll feel better knowing that the things you do keep are the important ones.

    And don't think of it as parting with things you'd rather have kept. Think of it as making room for more new stuff.

    Good luck.

    Tom
    • Here's the shorter version: "Delete some of that shit!"
            How to do it? Easy, make a "long term archive" folder of stuff you *know* you'll want someday, everything else if you haven't touched it in a year (or three or five or whatever arbitrary cutoff you decide on) - delete it!

    • Delete? Never!! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by swillden ( 191260 ) <shawn-ds@willden.org> on Sunday September 25, 2005 @01:39AM (#13642744) Journal

      Take a long hard look at what things you absolutely need, and toss the rest.

      Not me. For two reasons. First, I've too often found myself wishing I had something that I had deleted and second, it is simply not worth my time to wade through it all and decide what I need and what I don't. Disk space costs well under 50 cents per gigabyte, and even after you add some redundancy (RAID), it's still very cheap.

      • First, I've too often found myself wishing I had something that I had deleted

        Something that can easily be prevented by a well thought out short/medium/longterm storage policy.

        and second, it is simply not worth my time to wade through it all and decide what I need and what I don't. Disk space costs well under 50 cents per gigabyte

        The bigger the disk, the longer it takes before you get the dreaded 'disk full' message, but it will take exponentially longer to recover from it. In other words, you can't prevent

        • Re:Delete? Never!! (Score:3, Interesting)

          by swillden ( 191260 )

          The bigger the disk, the longer it takes before you get the dreaded 'disk full' message, but it will take exponentially longer to recover from it.

          Who cares? The last disk I added took three days to be fully on-line. But my investment in the process was about 30 minutes. It took 20 minutes to write the script to iterate through my RAID-5 volumes, run "pvmove" to migrate the data off of each volume, remove it from the volume group, rebuild it with the new disk and add it back into the group, then anothe

          • You did not understand what I said.
            I meant recover from a disk full condiion, not recover from a failure or adding a new disk or whattever.

            Tthere are momenets when a new/extra disk is not an option, ie, you need the space now, and there is no shop open, your storage enclosures are all filled up already etc.

            The more capacity you have, thte longer itt takes to figure out how to make the inmediately needed space available.

            • Tthere are momenets when a new/extra disk is not an option, ie, you need the space now, and there is no shop open, your storage enclosures are all filled up already etc.

              Only if you let that happen. It's not hard to stay ahead of your needs.

              • There is a limit to how much storage you can attach. That limit changes a bit depending on how much you are willing to spend. Staying ahead of your needs is simply not always possible.

                Not to mention that noone can see into the future, all you can do is predict when your disks will be full based on current usage. That is never gonna give you an absolutely correct picture.

                • There is a limit to how much storage you can attach. That limit changes a bit depending on how much you are willing to spend. Staying ahead of your needs is simply not always possible.

                  Unless your needs include very large amounts of video, I disagree. Disks are so large these days that it's pretty easy to stay ahead. When I can start ripping HD video from Blu-Ray disks, then you may have a point. Then again, perhaps fixed disk storage will keep up. Or not lag too far behind.

                  Not to mention that noon

                  • Unless your needs include very large amounts of video, I disagree. Disks are so large these days that it's pretty easy to stay ahead. When I can start ripping HD video from Blu-Ray disks, then you may have a point. Then again, perhaps fixed disk storage will keep up. Or not lag too far behind.

                    Or when your needs include saydoing multitrack audio recording? or you want a library of your music in a non-lossy format on your disks, and you happen to have a somwhat substantial amount of music?

                    Or you happen to be

                    • Or when your needs include saydoing multitrack audio recording? or you want a library of your music in a non-lossy format on your disks, and you happen to have a somwhat substantial amount of music?

                      No, I don't think audio does it. Consider that 1TB will hold over six *thousand* hours of FLAC-compressed CD-quality audio. Unless you're a professional recording studio, there's no way you'll have multiple terabytes of audio.

                      Video is different, but it still requires a *lot* to push the limits.

                      Or you ha

                    • No, I don't think audio does it. Consider that 1TB will hold over six *thousand* hours of FLAC-compressed CD-quality audio. Unless you're a professional recording studio, there's no way you'll have multiple terabytes of audio.

                      First of all, I know quite a few people who do have that much music around, you obviously are not among those.

                      Second, I don't have to be a professional recording studio for doing things like uncompressed multitrack recording, one of the very cool things about modern computers and sound
    • Expanding your home costs serious money, and is a real hassle. It makes sense to invest time and effort to get rid of things that might even feel emotionally attached to, just so that you can avoid this.

      Adding drive space is cheap and easy (USB storage can be added for well under $1/GB, takes a second to install, and will last for years). It would be quite easy, across multiple hard drive clean ups, to spend more effort organizing and deleting your hard drive content than it costs for you to simply add more
  • Software RAID5, I've got one along my 6 40Gb HDs.

    Not all that big (only 200Gb total) but if I got 3 of them HDs as payment on an old debt. I'm sure that if I had invested a little bit more I would have bought 4 SATA drives and rigged them up. Software raid isn't quick but it'll store stuff with the added bonus of allowing a drive to fail without losing anything.

    If you're into spending more money for better performance, buy a SATA RAID (levels 0,1,5) controler, there are a few on the market that aren't ove

    • Re:I took the easy way out (Score:5, Insightful)

      by karnal ( 22275 ) on Sunday September 25, 2005 @02:48AM (#13642954)
      RAID5 will fuck you if you depend on it to be your only failsafe on your data.

      Repeated again:

      RAID5 will fuck you if you depend on it to be your ONLY failsafe on your data.

      Your motherboard/controller could screw you. You could delete some files. 2 drives can fail at the same time (power surge,etc.)

      There's just no excuse for not backing things up. I personally have a DDS3 tape drive in my file server for once yearly backups. Every 6 months I do a set of rewritables (DVD+RW). Every year or so I make a permanent copy on DVD+ or -R, and I buy decent burnables for that.

      I've had instances where controllers, cables, and my own screw ups have lost data. But the cost to my time is minimal since I have backups in place. The way I figure it, the time I spend safeguarding my data is worth its weight in gold WHEN I have to depend on the backup for critical data.

      Besides, Corporations back up their data - why can't we? :)

  • What's your price range? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by dtfinch ( 661405 ) * on Saturday September 24, 2005 @11:44PM (#13642271) Journal
    If you're cheap, you can get the cheapest new system you can find, rip out the cd drive to free up an ide channel, find a way to safely mount four 250gb drives in it (I'd recommend the 250gb seagate 7200.8 for longevity, but that's just me) to make a raid 5, install a floppy drive, and use the floppy drive to do a net install of debian. Then set up samba for windows file sharing. That 750gb of redundant raid 5 storage will set you back between $500 and $900, depending on if you already have a system in mind to use for the job. Or you can get a good server with a similar setup for around $1500 or $1800, depending on if it needs to be fast.

    Or you can just delete the ISO's and TV episodes, if they're not worth the extra cost and you're never going to use/watch them again anyway.

    Whatever drives you get, make sure you research their quality first, especially if you don't care for the extra cost of a redundant raid and/or backups.
  • Your harddrive will be nearly empty.

    Or you could try a tape drive, but large DLT tapes can be expensive.

    I saw an automatic DVD changer. Its a robotic library that can automatically select one dvd out of 200 and load it. Thats 800GB. Get a DVD burner and one of these babies. Got more money? Get a large chassis and just add 500GB hitachi drives as you need them.

    So I guess eventually you're back to just buying the largest harddrives, the least expensive and most convenient thing next to cutting down on fat in
    • 200 DVDs = 800gb? No no, they store about 4.5gb each - unless you mean dual-layer, which would be 1.8TB (roughly). Single layer would be closer to 1200gb.
      • Where'd you learn math? 200 DVD's times 4.5GB (actually more like 4.4) per disc is only 900GB, less when you consider you can rarely fill the disc up completely due to odd files sizes. Plus most of those disc changer robots run to the thousands of dollars, you're better off dropping $6-700 on 4 or 5 300GB hard drives and a cheap PC to serve up files from them, I also suggest a seperate smaller drive (20-40GB is more than enough) to boot your OS off since software raid arrays aren't bootable. Put together a
        • Software raid is bootable, I do it all the time -- raid 1, that is.
          You set up /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1 as a 100-meg MD raid-1 volume to store /boot, the rest you can have whatever you want.
          My preference is to then have a root volume group that is also raid-1 to hold the OS and swap partition (you don't want to swap to raid-5). If you have 4 drives, then set up raid 1+0 for your root VG across the first slices of the drives, then set up the remainder of the disk space as raid 5.

    • Or you could try a tape drive, but large DLT tapes can be expensive.

      Right. DLT media costs a good deal more than large IDE drives do per GB nowadays, nevermind the cost of the DLT drive itself.

      Really, the only thing that's cheaper per gigabyte than IDE drives is DVD+/-R media. So if you're looking for archival or just backups, your cheapest bets are DVD+/-R (cheaper per GB, don't require rebooting or opening your case to switch media) or large IDE drives (faster, read/write, larger, probably likel

    • OR get a bunch of USB 2 or Firewire enclosures and a bunch of hard drives. Use those as your back up and storage system.

  • Just a few steps (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Daxster ( 854610 )
    First off, burn your shows to DVDs and your ISOs to CDs. Why have them on the hard drive if you aren't going to use them?
    I'd set up an older computer system (P2 or newer or older..) with a RAID configuration. Something like RAID1 for simplicity and redundancy. Then you just store everything on that central server and your client machines don't matter.

    Or get a bunch of chinese kids in your basement to memorize strings of 0's and 1's.

  • Just keep buying bigger drives (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Seriously, 200GB is peanuts. My MP3 collection alone is 100GB. I also back up all my computers (including the one with the 100GB MP3s) to hard drive, so I have two copies of all this stuff.

    I just bought one of these: LaCie Bigger Disk [bhphotovideo.com] for my Mac, which is 1TB RAID for under $1000.

    Just buy a TB or two, and if you fill that up any time soon, then, well, start deleting stuff. My personal files take up megabytes, my MP3s take up gigabytes, so 1TB is fine for me. 1TB ought to be enough for anybody.

    I'm even think
    • 1TB ought to be enough for anybody.

      Now, Bill ... remember that whole 640K thing.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • For ~$1000 I'd be suprised if you couldn't build your own 1TB Linux RAID5 box, but I may be wrong.

        Maxtor 300's for $115. Barebones system for under $100. A wide selection of 4-channel RAID cards for under $50 (NEVER use a softraid - which includes the crap solution on most NF4 boards - not to mention you'll someday bow down and thank His Noodlyness that you have your boot drive separate from the RAID).

        Under $1000? Try under $600, for either 1.2TB RAID0, or 900MB RAID5. Build two, and sync them once

    • You can think of buying hard drives as an investment, and see it as a never-ending buying process, or think it as a lease:

      • each year or two, you plan to spend $xxx on your disk space
      • as the prices are dropping, each year or two, you can buy more than twice the space you already use.

      Don't jump on the great new big drive, stick with the better $/G ratio (250G or 320G combinations these days).

      I evaluated some RAID, big drive, external multi-drive systems to "definitively solve the problem" and finally

  • Re-evaluate. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ColaMan ( 37550 ) on Saturday September 24, 2005 @11:57PM (#13642325) Journal
    Re-evaluate what's on your storage. You sound like me - a bit of a hoarder.

    Firstly, get a good catalogue system going. Put all your crap in one area. Get a sorted listing of creation time,last access time and categories. Get some hard-and-fast rules going as to when it should be archived offline. Go through once a month (or more often) and work out any new stuff that you need to backup. You do backup, don't you? Of course you do.

    Then go through and check the last access times of your categories, and move to offline storage as appropriate.The advantage of getting this sort of regime going is that you've got more chance of having a backup offline somewhere when the inevitable happens and your drive wakes up dead one day.

    For example, once you've got categories and last access times sorted:

    - Digital Photos, family movies , documents - anything more than 12 months - Offline to DVD. Use par2 [par2.net] for archive copies (sent to distant relatives for storage), but make another set without par2 for normal, semi-random access.

    - ISO's of distros? Got a broadband connection? Ditch them.
    No broadband? Get them all offline, regardless of age.

    - TV Episodes? If it's later than say, 3 months - off to DVD they go.

    - Web Site content? 3 months.

    And so on. Work the times out for yourself.

    You really need a good cataloging system to help find out where the offline files are. Everyone's idea of a good catalog is different - Hell, I just label DVD's and keep them sorted by catagory - so I'll leave it to you.

    If you organise your data and find that you still haven't enough drive space to keep all your current data online, then (and only then) go and look at the expensive options.
    • Use of JGoodies JDisk Report [jgoodies.com] helps me find old & large files easily, on any platform, and take appropriate steps to eradicate the primary offenders. The OP needs a $50 DVD burner and a spool of DVD's rather than that much HDD storage for home.
  • We recently purchased a NAS from eRacks [eracks.com], which we are happy with & is slightly less expensive than the options you posted.

    Ther are MANY tutorials on building your own RAIDed NAS on the net. Some have been slashdotted. Here's one. [librenix.com] Google for others.
  • Just get a nice big case (I have one with 15x5.25" bays and 2x3.5" bays). Build a cheap PC out of it (CPU power and RAM aren't particularly important). Then just buy drives as necessary and add them to the storage pool. Run Linux or Windows on it and share the space up with Samba, NFS, or whatever. Investigate iSCSI if you want it to look like a real physical drive on the client side.

    I buy drives four at a time, along with a 4 channel disk controller. I put them into Coolermaster 4-in-3 drive cages th

  • I don't think you want to know, but... (Score:4, Informative)

    by slaker ( 53818 ) on Sunday September 25, 2005 @01:38AM (#13642741)
    I'm a believer in segregating storage from the machines I'm likely to use/want to reload etc.
    And I've spent thousands of dollars on my home network and attendant PCs, to solve the problems that the original poster will only have if he manages to actually get enough storage for his needs.

    Presently I have four identical storage servers, with the following characteristics:
    Athlon64/3000, 1GB RAM, Gigabyte K8VM800 motherboards, 4 Hitachi 7k250s (RAID5 on 3ware ), 2 Hitachi 7k400s (soft RAID0, stores a daily snapshot of the RAID5, which is the data that is actually shared), 1 Samsung SP1614 Boot/OS drive, a 3Ware 8506-4LP, Intel Gbit NICs.

    These machines run a series of scripts that collect and copy (pictures or MP3s) or move (video) whatever I happened to have dropped on my various workstations (each have between 300GB and ~1.7TB) to appropriate filesystems on the various servers (one for porn, one for ripped DVDs and TV shows, one for music, one for pictures); those filesystems are then exported via NFS to another Linux machine where the whole mess is presented back to all my machines as a single file system.

    Getting enough storage is simply a matter of applying money. 250GB drives are quite reasonable nowadays and 160GB drives are downright cheap, but dealing with dinky little disks make getting enough SATA ports problematic. Sub-$100 2- and 4-port SATA controllers from the likes of Adaptec, Promise and Highpoint have their own problems. Most don't do online volume management and REALLY only do RAID through a driver, rather than an actual onboard processor. They're fine for storage expansion, a JBOD or RAID0 (note: RAID0 is normally a VERY stupid thing to do, since most people aren't doing STR-intensive things with their PCs and the chance of losing data is substantially higher than for any single disk), but as with everything else, you get what you pay for, and ports on a proper controller are probably worth more than the disks you're attaching to them.
    RAID5 is also kind of a bad deal for write-intensive data - lots of little files that get updated a lot, while I'm at it. Do RAID1 or RAID10, (or maybe RAID3 if you can find a controller that supports it) for data you care about. Spend money. :)

    USB2 and Firewire enclosures are NOT a good solution for adding primary storage most of the time. Generic enclosures frequently have difficulty with larger drives, and often have VERY cheap fans that either fail quickly or detriorate to the point that they sound like a penny in a vaccuum cleaner. Additionally, the performance and CPU utilization of USB2 enclosures both tend to be god-awful. Brand-name enclosures have a few different problems: many use 2.5" disks, which in my experience are rather delicate. Others are not properly cooled, and almost all of them are sealed enclosures. Better to put a drive inside a computer if possible. I tend to think of USB2/Firewire drives drives as backup devices only.

    Disk-wise I tend to prefer Hitachi 250 and 400GB models, or Samsung 160s or 200s, and SATA over PATA when possible. The Hitachi 500GB models get too damned hot, and it's the only one that's out (available for purchase) at the moment. Seagate and Maxtor ATA products tend toward tepid performance, and in the case of Maxtor, quality hasn't been good since the Quantum merger in 2001. I will not purchase a Western Digital drive for any reason, but specifically I avoid the geek-favorite Raptor 360GD; I was party to the construction of a small 20-drive SAN using Raptors (client's spec, not my idea) a couple years ago where the drive failure rate was approximately one drive every 33 days.
    • I doubt that you *need* that amount of live data, althought I'm sure you *want* it. Regardless of how fun it might seem to implement such a solution, it really is the wrong solution for the problem.
      • People don't *need* boats or brand new cars, yet some people have those, too.

        I have a great deal of original content, mostly things that I have video-captured myself over the last 10 years or so. I actually had about 4TB of material on my hard disks before I got broadband (and another five or six on CDs or DVDs), which was only a couple years ago for me.
        • The grandparent has a point. A64/3000s for file storage is a little overkill isn't it? I have a three Pentium 3 / Tualatin's which are very effective in regards to power/watt running both software and hardware RAID-5. The bottleneck is STILL the ethernet (gigabit, switched). Even with 90%+ of the bandwidth to each server maxed out, the CPU loads barely hit 50% (a little higher with NFS instead of smb). Shouldn't building file servers focus on actual data thoroughput and not processing speed? Granted

  • Simple. (Score:4, Funny)

    by clambake ( 37702 ) on Sunday September 25, 2005 @01:47AM (#13642766) Homepage
    Print a harcopy.
  • This thing, from http://www.infrant.com/ [infrant.com], can be had for around $600 US without drives, which is not much more than it would cost to build your own. It lets you start with two mirrored drives in RAID 1, then add another drive or two, and it transparently migrates to RAID 5. Pretty cool.

    Note I have no financial interest in Infrant, I just want their products. :)
    • Yup, I've been looking for an affordable NAS unit for a while and for one reason or another I was not satisfied with what I had seen so far (the Burly box, Buffalotech NAS amount others). I recently discovered Infrant and I have to agree, either the ReadyNAS X6 or ReadyNAS 600 is a great way for home or SOHO users to easily backup and store a lot of data quickly and easily.

      Infrant uses a dedicated custom CPU (NSP) specifically designed for network storage and a Linux based OS to achieve excellent performan

  • what works for me (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Eil ( 82413 ) on Sunday September 25, 2005 @02:13AM (#13642850) Homepage Journal

    It sounds like you may be a digital packrat. If you are, I sympathize as I was one too after I got broadband. I stopped after realizing how much time/money I was wasting on crap that really didn't improve my quality of life. Now I buy new hard drives for my file server once every three years instead of every three months. Following are some of the things that helped me.

    1) Download less porn/warez. Or put off downloading more until you've watched/run/played what you have. If you're just one person cranking through that much space that quickly, then you're downloading things just to have them. Stop that.

    2) Go through and 'rm -rf' files and directories that you haven't accessed in a year. Don't keep obsolete versions of operating systems around, because you won't use them. As soon as you download a CD image, burn it and rm the ISO.

    3) Archive on external media anything that's sentimental but rarely accessed.

    4) Make it a routine to burn stuff to CD/DVD at least once a week. Eventually, you'll get tired of wasting time burning crap that you don't use and this will help you realize that you really don't need it at all.

    5) If you do a lot of video editing or webmastering that requires huge amounts of data, and you're making money at it, then you need to invest in a proper server to keep all that. Be sure to make backups too. If you do this for a company, have them take responsibility for this.

    6) Take a page from Linus's book: Upload it to an FTP server and let the world mirror it.

  • RAID (Score:2)

    by Guspaz ( 556486 )
    Cheap PC and RAID-5.

    Assuming you already have a cheap PC, throw a SATA replication card in (Cheapest way to get RAID-5) and you have yourself an array.

    Using cheap drives (WD 7200RPM 250GB has the lowest cost-per-gig here) you can get 1TB of total storage for for $488 USD. Of course to get 1TB in RAID5 that means an extra drive, so the cost for 1.25TB of total storage is $610 USD.

    Of course if you don't have a PC to use, a NAS server ($130 USD), two USB enclosures ($25 each) and of the 250GB drives and you h
  • ...if you haven't thought about it in five years, haven't used it in two years, or haven't seen it this past year, you should throw it out.
  • As far as long-term, this will buy you quite a while (probably). The CoolerMaster Stacker case is pretty nifty, and employs 3-to-4 drive bay inserts to turn 3x5.25" bays into 4x3.5" bays and has a 120mm fan mounted directly on the insert for better drive cooling. Then, just throw mobo+proc+etc... into it and get a 3ware SATA RAID card (the 12-port 9500 series is a good choice, especially if you want good scalability). Then, I'd say make 1 (or two) 2TB RAID5 setups using 6 x 400gig Seagate SATA drives. I say
  • I'm with you on this issue. I've gone from 20MB way back when in the day to about 2TB of storage on my current network. I have 2 Desktops with RAID1 setups (2x200GB and 2x250GB respectively), a small server with RAID1 (2x120GB) and a few other assorted PCs with multiple different drives of varying capacities.

    And I don't want to sound like an ad, but... ...the machine I am loving the most these days is the Buffalo Terastation (http://www.buffalotech.com/products/product-detai l.php?productid=97&categoryi [buffalotech.com]
    • Runs some embedded Linux I believe. Also has 4 USB2 ports through which you can attach more disks for more storage. I think it can also print through them, but I don't use that feature (stupid old parallel printer) so I'm not 100% sure on that.

      It runs a really weird hacked up version of PPC Linux:

      admin@TERASTATION:~$ uname -a Linux TERASTATION 2.4.20_mvl31-ppc_linkstation #15 Tue May 31 10:18:19 JST 2005 ppc unknown

      An sshd went on there about 16 minutes after it was in the house. Mine's the low-en

  • Take a look at 'man rm'. There all answers to Your question. If this solution does not fit Your needs, simply buy 1 or 2 >400GB HDD and USB/Firewire case for each, then You don't need any servers and can shuffle between hard drives 'live'.

  • My approach (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I have two OpenBSD systems (Compaq D5S SFF boxes), each with a 400GB hard disk. One sits at home in a segregated part of the network running Samba. This serves up files for a Powerbook (OS X) and my wife's Dell (Win XP). The other system sits at my best friend's house. Both systems allow SSH with public key auth only. I tunnel rsync over SSH from the master box at home to the other system to sync files. This happens once a day at 2am.

    The master box at home has a cheap DDS4 drive which I got from eBay for ab
  • Check out this free utility [win.tue.nl]. You might be surprised how much stuff you DON'T want is lurking on your system. This will help you track it down.

  • man... (Score:2, Informative)

    by slorge ( 722786 )
    delete most of your porn. It mostly looks alike anyway, so just ditch it. You should then have close to 200 GB free.
  • SGI has a neat solution to this problem called DMF [sgi.com]. It will automatically migrate infrequently-accessed files onto tape, and 'recover' them when accessed (takes a little longer than normal) automatically when there's a tape library, and I expect it will prompt an operator to load a tape if the tape isn't online.

    I've no idea what the cost is, or if there's a low-end solution.

  • 2.8TB RAID 5 for $4100 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Yeechang Lee ( 3429 ) * on Sunday September 25, 2005 @12:31PM (#13644831)
    See my signature. And that was seven to nine months ago, so it might very well be cheaper now, and/or possible to get more capacity with the newly-available 500GB drives.

    Yes, $4100 is a lot of money. But I built it for exactly the reason you mentioned; I've always been of the philosophy of "do it once and do it right," and this way I've taken care of my storage needs for years to come.

  • Back when I was your age sonny, I had this problem with disks filling up. My dad did not let me have many disks, and never got me a double density drive. For years I worked hard to keep all my data on my collection of floppies. Over time things grew to over 100 disks, but never as fast as I needed them.

    As technology marched on, dad eventually bought a computer with a large 80 megabyte harddrive (Back when 40 was standard), which when combined with dr-dos's disk compression lasted a few months before I

    • Must have sucked editting video on those floppies gramps... Seriously though, today's multimedia systems provide way more activities to waste storage on compared to your TRS-80. Suppose you want to store home movies, or edit photography, mix your own music, or even study special effects. All that requires space. And those are all activies that traditionally require at least a garage full of equipment,and are not traditionally considered computer nerd fare. But whatever, don't let me take you away from your
  • ...is something like this
    http://www.pcsuperstore.com/products/G22301-Netgea r-SC101NA.html [pcsuperstore.com] (Use your favourite seller, this was the first link that I clicked on.)
    It's a true SAN device, hence block access, which means fast. You can just add more devices as needed. If I remember correctly, you can "team" devices for better performance, or larger virtual drives.
    The only problem so far ... I can't find anyone who has them on stock. :-(
    Also, I am not sure what the access from Linux situation is; I think I saw a
  • I just get bigger (or more) harddisks now, because in the past I have wasted too much time copying data
    1. from harddisk to floppy disk
    2. from floppy disk to harddisk to bigger floppy disk
    3. from floppy disk to harddisk to CD
    4. from CD to harddisk to DVD..

    And then when I need something that's archived on CD or DVD I copy it to harddisk again. I just want stuff readily available, so instead of spending countless hours archiving back and forth I now just get that bigger harddisk and usually by the time I run out o

  • In August 2004 I purchased a LaCie Big Disk Extreme 320 GB striped RAID array. Very nice, extremely fast performance on my Power Mac G5, but it failed 3 days outside of the one year warrenty. So what happened? One of the two hard drives in the unit stopped working. LaCie attempted to repair the drive by replacing everything but the two drives inside the unit with out success. DriverSavers.com quoted $1500 - $4500 for data recovery while OnTrack.com quoted $2500 - $3500 for data recovery. Since my thes
  • Well if collecting is you're sport you can start again try: del *.* Hmm you might burn the family photo's on CD first before you try this magic trick, otherwise you're family might get a bit angry.
  • I think you're a bit of a horder. I mean come on, who keeps TV episodes on his hard drive? Actually I've got CloneWars, but that's different!

    Mind you I've just bought 2x200Gb drives for my fileserver, as the old 40+160Gb was not enough for DVD rips and a load of VMWare sessions.

    My routine is:

    1. download/rip etc. the files and store them on the hard drive.

    2. If I've not used a file in a month:
    2a. If I think I may need to lay my hands on it quickly (like ghost images and fedora iso's), bung it on the
  • My collection of family photos, web site content, TV episode captures, music files, and my archive of ISO files for various operating systems, they just eat up my hard drive space so fast.
    Yeah... we all know how much space web site content can consume...
  • on a windows box?

    windows movie maker is your friend, drop a movie into moviemaker, check the resolution of the movie.. then save your movie in the smallest file size that keeps those dimensions.. chews up a lotta CPU cycles, but can reduce filesizes by half..

    I drop most of my videos right off, quality does suffer, but- still very viewable. I just dropped a 1.06 gb download into 602 mb...
    • You poor thing... I can't believe what you've gone through...

      Windows Movie Maker turns movies into crap. Using ffmpegX (GUI front-end for ffmpeg and mplayer) you can make H.264 versions of your movies. What does this mean? It means movies don't loose quality and can be 3 times smaller than WMV files.

      Windows Movie Maker is a sham. It doesn't do anyone any good. ffmpeg and mplayer actually are worth a damn in terms of quality. Oh, and they're free and cross platform. Always a plus.

  • There is no solution, and buying harddrives is simply the cheapest way to add extra storage.

    I have over 2 terabytes on my LAN, and would never dream of buying an HD less than 400G nowadays. I also have about 5000 CD-Rs and 2000 DVD-Rs full of offline-content. Everything is indexed in greppable text files.

    There is no escape. Drives become full, and then you must offload files as fast as you add new ones. For me, this is 5-10G a day.

    My point is: There is no escape. You can't win, you can't break even

  • If you can't afford the storage, you don't need to save.... pretty simple if you take a step back and look at the situation.... Like the yocal in Mad Max said, "Speed is just a matter of money, how fast do you wanna go?" You gotta pay to play. sorry for the reality check.

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