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
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