I think I need more storage, what do you guys think?


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Get some more drives then. HDs are so cheap now that it's quite affordable for anyone to have a ridiculous amount of space :)

Sorry, forgot to add the "/sarcasm" tag in my posting... :D

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What do you have on all those drives?? :blink: :blink:

I have mentioned a few times on here before, but it is a very elaborate yet simplified (in my mind) system of incredible redundancy minus a complex and costly raid configuration. I really like the externals in that they go to sleep when I don't use them. Hence, I am not sitting at work for hours on end with the thought that I have drives at home spinning away and racking up lifecycles without me even touching them.

I really only have about 1.7 TB of actual content, but it is all kept in three different spots at the same time. Essentially, VOL1, VOL4, VOL7 are all the same, VOL2, VOL5 and VOL8 are all them same, finally, VOL3, VOL6 and VOL9 are all the same.

Music is on 3,6,9

Ripped TV Shows are on 2,5,8

Software, Movies, Personal Files and Archives are on 1,4,7

If I need constant uptime for when I am at home, I kick off a small shell script that mounts and runs a touch against every drive once a minute, keeping them alive. Having said that, the only big downsides are:

The initial wake-up of all 9 drives (~30 seconds) when I get home.

The latency of an OS X Server (and 3 TB) being on a 54MB link in the garage.

Some folks take time out of their day to say that "I could do just as much with half the capacity" and I have to remind them that I did all of this for less than a grand and that I haven't lost a single file via my system.

Yeah, I probably could do it a better way, but I like the setup I have and I am too cheap to do anything else.

Oh, and VOL99 is my Time Machine drive. Don't worry about her, she's small time....

Strange but true-- His other drives are bigger than the drive the system is on...

But you may want to pick-up another 3TB just to be on the safe side.

The three most recent drives (VOL7-9) were picked up compliments of Slickdeals.net, 212$ for all three.

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....

If I need constant uptime for when I am at home, I kick off a small shell script that mounts and runs a touch against every drive once a minute, keeping them alive.

.....

could you elaborate on this script a little ?

I like that idea - but know nothing about how to do it -- I know youre in OS-X - but possibly you know of, or I can find, a linux or MS equivalent

Thanks

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could you elaborate on this script a little ?

I like that idea - but know nothing about how to do it -- I know youre in OS-X - but possibly you know of, or I can find, a linux or MS equivalent

Thanks

I have an OS X Leopard server running on an older G4 down in my garage, 3 drives are hanging off it.

On that box (MOE), I have VOL4, VOL5 and VOL6. I mount those drives on my Mac Mini (NOSTROMO), which has VOL7, VOL8 and VOL9. My Airport Extreme N router (WEYLAND) has a USB hub on it. Into that I have VOL1, VOL2 and VOL3. Once they are all mounted up, I run touch.sh, which touches a ".touch" file on every drive and cycles every 60 seconds. But, all touch.sh has to do is hit them all at /Volumes/VOL*/.touch since they are already mounted.

Touch should work just about the same in Linux, but I don't know Linux all that well.

Some additional resources are at: http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/s...cmds5/touch.htm

Edited by pdmcmahon
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Some folks take time out of their day to say that "I could do just as much with half the capacity" and I have to remind them that I did all of this for less than a grand and that I haven't lost a single file via my system.

Yeah, I probably could do it a better way, but I like the setup I have and I am too cheap to do anything else.

I have two harddrives in my computer, split into 3 partitions. A total of roughly one terabyte. On the smallest partition is my OS. On the largest partition are my games and cd/dvd images for easy mounting in a virtual drive. On my second largest partition are all my backups, mp3's, and emulators. (I LOVES my SNES!!!)

Everything else is....burned to disc! That's it. No redundancy, no nothing. A harddrive's SMART system SHOULD alert you to the fact that it's dying anyway. Oh, there is ONE redundancy. My main My Documents (or User folder as it's called nowadays) Is on two different harddrives, just in case. The rest of it can really be re-acquired online.

And I haven't lost a single file either.

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could you elaborate on this script a little ?

I like that idea - but know nothing about how to do it -- I know youre in OS-X - but possibly you know of, or I can find, a linux or MS equivalent

Thanks

Touch should work just about the same in Linux, but I don't know Linux all that well.

touch IS from linux.

OS X is basically Linux TEX4S so most things done in Linux are the same way in OSX (thru command line)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touch_(Unix)

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They're all half full... seriously, what are you doing with 9.5TB of storage? Professional HD video editing?

Edit : Hum, you already answered. I always need to be told twice, this is why I'm asking again :)

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They're all half full... seriously, what are you doing with 9.5TB of storage? Professional HD video editing?

Edit : Hum, you already answered. I always need to be told twice, this is why I'm asking again :)

No one in their right mind would edit HD video on external USB drives :)

Nah, it's just for storage, my friend...... storage....

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  • 2 weeks later...

You could at least have your desktop icons 128x128 :rolleyes:

Too bad OS X doesn't allow for 512 on the desktop, you'd have a new Wallpaper.

;)

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sounds like you need a drobo! Or get a dns-323 i have one of them setup as a mirror for my itunes library

Funny you mention that, I am currently shopping around for a bare bones Drobo since I decided to pull the three volumes from my OSX server to install them in a disk array for better access.

I pulled VOL4-VOL6 from their 2 different brands of external cases, turns out they are all Western Digital green drives, 2 at 8MB cache and 1 at 16MB cache.

For now, they are just sitting on the workbench down in my garage.

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Seems like a bit of an overkill (data in 3 places) for things that could easily be replaced (tv episodes and music). It's very unlikely that 2 drives with the same data are going to fail at the exact time.

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Seems like a bit of an overkill (data in 3 places) for things that could easily be replaced (tv episodes and music).

While I agree with the sentiment: I don't think it's easy to replace a terabyte of media.

Even assuming you have plain old DVD copies of everything (because they're dead-simple to rip) It's going to take at least 15 minutes per movie * say 150 movies (8gb each). Even if it only takes 1 minute of attention to rip a movie - that's still 2.5 hours to re-rip all your movies, and that time is interrupted by 15 minute blocks of waiting.

The alternative is to just shell out $75 and buy an extra 1TB and duplicate the works. Restoration time gets cut to nil: just drag/drop from the network location to your new drive and let it copy over night. No user interaction required.

I think the OP has made his redundancy solution needlessly complicated but it's better to be too complex than not safe enough.

It's very unlikely that 2 drives with the same data are going to fail at the exact time.

House fire. Robbery. Flood. Extra space in "rm -rf" bug in Finder, etc.

I'm not sure how the OP keeps them in sync but I assume it's something more reliable that just copying set 1 to set 2 and set 2 to set 3. The most common source of dataloss is user error: accidently deleting a file/folder that you intended to keep. Having a 6-months worth of incremental backups vs an exact copy of last weeks drive is almost always going to be more valuable because it allows you flexibility to what version you restore to.

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