Data

How much data do you have on your computer? How do you store it? What are the consequences if that data one day goes *poof*? I've been dealing with data problems for a while. It started when I changed from film to digital photography. Before that, the data on my computer that I really needed was just a few files that I could keep on a couple of different floppies. I was secure. Life was good.

Now, my shoebox full of photos is all of these bits and bytes. Digital photo files are huge. My first archival solution was CD-ROMs. But when I got my first digital SLR, I could rather easily shoot enough to fill four or five CD-ROMs in a single weekend! Finally, I built a new computer with a fancy DVD-ROM drive. A lot better than CD's, but I was still burning several DVDs a month. Finding photos is a chore. Put a disc in and look. It's not there. Eject. Another disk... Then the big shocker: They aren't reliable. I've already lost at least two DVD-ROMs. They just don't have readable data on them anymore. *poof*.

So, what to do? Keep the photo's on your hard drive? They crash. Backup to an external hard drive? Possible, but a pain to schedule backups, and I would already be over the 250GB of the data drive in this computer, so then I would be back to "Where are those pictures?"

The Solution? A network-attached storage RAID device. What is that? A small box that contains multiple hard disk that attaches to my home network. That multiple drive thing is the key. when you write a file to the drive, it spreads it around to all of the drives and makes the data redundant. So, if one drive fails, not only is the data still okay, the entire unit is still running. Just pull out the bad drive and slide in another and it rebuilds itself without ever turning anything off. It has other interesting qualities too. Right now, I have four 500GB drives inside for 1.5TB of storage (the RAID redundancy overhead takes 25% in a 4 disk scenario). But, when 1.0TB hard drives start becoming cost effective, I can just swap in the new discs with the current ones and voilà, I have 3.0TB of storage. Also, I access it from my MythTV (think Tivo) Linux box downstairs, Meg can access it from her Mac, and I can get to it anywhere I find an internet connection.

I choose the Infrant ReadyNAS NV+. It was slightly more expensive than a couple of basic "home only" solutions, but so far I can say it was highly worth it. Easy to set up, quiet, fast. Highly recommended.