trebejo Wrote:
> I'm surprised at how little you guys care for the RAID 5 idea. My
> problem is that at the moment I've got a couple of those external
> seagates (nice quiet gadgets and they look nice btw) and between the
> two of 'em they combine 700gb of room (ok 640gb actually) and they have
> about 30gb free combined. And that's after I backed up a little onto
> some DVDs. Perhaps it's the size of the collection that's the problem
> (I'm tagging like a madman so at the moment I only show the usual 900
> album and 10000 songs but I think that by the time it's said and done
> I'll be around the 3000 album line). Rock 'n roll won't take up so much
> space, but classical is a toughie because you can always get another
> version of symphony X...
Ok, for a library that large, RAID 5 makes a lot more sense.
- The overall cost to run RAID 5 isn't that much greater than for
non-RAID. It's essentially the cost of one extra drive. The more
disks you use, the smaller this incremental cost.
- It gives you the ability to have a single, very large volume,
rather than dealing with many smaller single-disk volumes. This can
make library management a lot easier.
- Like docbee says, if you have a lot of hard drives, then you _will_
eventually lose some. You're mathematically multiplying the odds that
it will happen. Running RAID makes this event less of an
inconvenience.You're still going to need a backup strategy. I'm not sure
what I'd do
to backup a terrabyte or more of data. If you want to backup to disk,
then assuming your array is 4 x 320GB disks, you'll need another 3 x
320GB of disk space for backup purposes. Thats a good $500 just for
backup space, but that's mostly a factor of having such a large
library. I can imagine the number of hours that will ultimately go
into ripping and meticulously tagging 3000 albums, and $500 would be
cheap insurance to keep from having to do it again.
> Anyway, back to the RAID issue. Doesn't the RAID do something about the
> occasional hard drive death? Like, if one dies, I can replace it and
> not lose any data? Yeah, sure, the big fire hits and all bets are off,
> but otherwise, isn't the RAID 5 setup quite a bit more robust than
> nothing at all? You guys make it sound like such a loser.
Sure, there's no question that it's more robust, but the question is
whether you need this kind of robustness for this type of application.
For a home music server it's mostly just one of convenience, in that you
can keep running after a single disk failure, and you don't have to
spend time restoring from your backups (that you maintain religiously
:-).
--
JJZolx
Jim
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