I would argue that ZFS is superior to RAID in almost all situations these days. Ben
On Fri, Apr 15, 2016 at 2:01 PM, Jörn Nettingsmeier < netti...@stackingdwarves.net> wrote: > On 04/15/2016 07:09 PM, John Leonard wrote: > >> A question: >> >> Most of my recording is now 4 four or six channel 96/24 and >> currently, I back up from the recorders to bare hard drives via an >> eSATA docking station, which means that I have an every-increasing >> pile of hard drives, as I back up every thing important twice. I’ve >> pretty much standardised on 2TB drives; a mixture of Seagate and >> Western Digital (I keep telling myself that it’s cheaper than a reel >> of 1” Ampex 456, but at the rate that I’m piling the drives up, it’s >> still a bit daunting.) >> >> Although this system works pretty well, and I use DiskTracker to keep >> a record of what’s where, It does mean that I just have a shelf full >> of 3.5” hard drives, which is a) a bit messy and b) a bit of a risk. >> The cloud is an option - or at least it will be once I get my >> super-duper-whizzy even faster Virgin upgrade, but even at the >> current upload rate of 10 MB, a full drive takes days to upload and >> then it’s not exactly quick to get it back. >> >> Given that I don’t have an educational establishment with huge >> servers, anyone got any reasonably-priced suggestions for storage? >> > > All my "live" data (i.e. the stuff I'm currently working on that has not > been delivered to the client yet) sits on a 4TB RAID1 (mirror), plus one > "cold copy". > Whenever a new generation of harddrives with massively more capacity is > coming up, that "working RAID" gets upgraded and the old disks moved into > "cold storage" duty. > Right now, a RAID1 of 2 8TB disks should be the "sweet spot". > > Watch out with shingled recording drives: they are slow to write, so not > nice for editing, but good for storage. > > For "cold storage", like you, I keep docking stations around and shelve > the drives just like videotapes :) For absolutely critical data, keep one > copy off-site, maybe with a trusted colleague who would appreciate the same > service? Insert calculations about nuclear blast radius here. > > Michael hinted at RAID5. I would advise against using it anymore, for the > simple reason that rebuilding a huge failed array can take days, during > which there is a high load on the system with a high probability of a > second drive failure. Go for RAID 6 once your arrays get really huge, it > has a double parity mechanism, so any two out of N disks can fail. Of > course you only get (N-2) times the capacity of a single drive. > And while I'm preaching: don't use hardware RAID controllers, unless you > can afford to keep one as a backup in case the first one fails. Their disk > formats are not standardized, they are not necessarily compatible to > anything you might be able to buy ten years from now. Instead, get a > software RAID box. > > All best, > > > Jörn > > > > -- > Jörn Nettingsmeier > Lortzingstr. 11, 45128 Essen, Tel. +49 177 7937487 > > Meister für Veranstaltungstechnik (Bühne/Studio) > Tonmeister VDT > > http://stackingdwarves.net > > > _______________________________________________ > Sursound mailing list > Sursound@music.vt.edu > https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound - unsubscribe here, > edit account or options, view archives and so on. > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/private/sursound/attachments/20160415/d9f03ef0/attachment.html> _______________________________________________ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound - unsubscribe here, edit account or options, view archives and so on.
