On Sat, Dec 6, 2008 at 8:31 AM, Lee Jones <lee@frumble.claremont.edu> wrote:

>
> I can't fit all my images files on "a couple" of mirrored hard
> drives now! Managing the storage and ensuring backup copy/ies is
> a lot of work once you exceed the capacity of a single drive.
>

Someday soon osx is supposed to be getting zfs. In the meantime you could run
an opensolaris server and use raidz (similar space tradeoff to raid 5)
to protect your data.

Say you have 5 * 1TB drives - you get one big volume of 4GB

When you "scrub" the volume (once a week or so), zfs checksums every
block you have used.
If there are checksum errors it will correct them and log them to the
drive status, so you can see if a drive is failing.

If you want to be even safer, you can use an extra disk and raid2z,
but that is probably not necessary as you would also have offsite
backups, would you not? Depends how quickly you need to be able to
recover from a disk failure.

A 1TB drive is getting so large that the uncorrectable error rate of
the drive means you should expect an uncorrectable error once in a
while. A normal mirror on windows isn't going to help you there.

Cheap zfs server can be built from a cheap AMD motherboard and one of
the 64bit semprons. Probably 2 or 4GB of ram depending on the storage
size and the performance you need. opensolaris is nearly as easy to
install as linux. If you have an old ATX case you can use that as the
powersupply demands should not be too high.

You can share the volume with smb or export it as a iSCSI volume.

If your photos need to be kept safe you should be able to build a
server for a few cents per photo.

John La Rooy
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