Jan
13
2009

Space – the final frontier

I can’t believe I am saying this, but I am actually running out of space on my computer. This sounds silly to me and yet at the same time it doesn’t.

I am currently using 75% of my disks and that is after I removed about 80GB of data the other night.

You see, when I built this version of my machine some time ago I used old hard drives and added more as I have always done.

This has left me with 2 X 160GB, 2 X 250GB, 1 X 320GB. I probably spent the same amount each time, it is just that the bang for your buck has gone up. I don’t like to throw away perfectly good working kit, so this has left me in a situation where I am using 5 drives to do what could technically be done with 1 now. Well, I say it could be done, part of the reason I use lots of drives is to protect against data loss in case a hard disk dies (I have never had a disk in my machine die on me).

In the case of my setup I use the 2 250GB drives as data and data backup. Problem now is my data is running out of room and I like to keep my data on two same size disks.

The only solution for my current way of thinking is to remove the two 250’s (well, probably the 160’s and give the 250’s their role) and replace them with something like a pair of 500GB or 750’s or something. However this is a lot of work and still leaves me with a problem I wish to address.

I am all for being able to get to my data from anywhere at any time. The problem with my monolith of a computer is yes, it has loads of space in it, yes, it is very powerful, but it also requires a lot of power to run and I don’t like leaving it on overnight etc.

The only real solution for me is a data server. Some low power box that contains disk after disk and keeps my data safe. There are some cheap ones out there (this springs to mind) but me being me, this isn’t quite good enough. It only holds 2 disk which means to keep my data secure I have to to use RAID 1 which mirrors the two drives. This means I loose 50% to storage space to backup’s. What I really want is a box that supports RAID 5 where i only loose 33% to backup. Problem here is it needs at least 3 drives and those all in one boxes I like so much don’t do RAID 5 as much.

So far the best solution to my issues is this device: TS-509 Pro Turbo NAS

It holds upto 5 drives, it contains more features than you can shake a very big stick at and most importantly, it rebuilds the arrays, expands them etc all by itself, I don’t need to spend days breaking it or rebuilding it myself if I need more storage. The only catch is it is about £600. I guess that is the price you pay if you want to keep your data safe and accessible.

One comment

  1. Demelza says:

    You had better start saving then.

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