Mrs. MarkBarbieri would not be happy about that. I told her that it would be all the space I need for a couple of years.
Mark you win. I have a netgear NAS with 4 2tb hard drives done in raid that leaves about 5.4 tb's of usable space with the raid. It is fun not worrying about where to put stuff!
I have a pair of Infrant (now NetGear) NASes. One has four 1.5TB drives and the other has four 2TB drives. This new setup is for my personal machine, not for network storage. If I like it, I might replace the NASes next year with a server using a similar storage setup.
Ok, anyone beside me thought with past hot air balloon pics and helicoptor pics, Mark had somehow got on a space flight?
That would be way cool. That's kind of a tough gig to get.
Dude!!!
That is some serious space.... Now - to ask the painful question:
What on earth are you using for an offsite backup system? All the space and RAID reduncancy in the world aren't going do you a bit of good if its the only spot your files are in. A physical failure (fire/water,etc) or a RAID controller failure (corruption of raid data) can make the fact that something is RAIDED for drive failure irrelevant.
Here's my basic approach:
1) My primary long term storage is one of my NAS boxes. It has four drives in a RAID 5 configuration. I copy all important shoots to it and my local machine before I start editing. I later replace the NAS folder with the folder on my local machine to get rid of the rejected pictures.
2) With the extra space on my local machine, I plan to keep a copy of everything on my local machine. That gives me two copies in the house - one on the NAS and one on my local machine.
3) For offsite backups, I load files onto a set of plain 3.5" hard drives and keep them at my office. That's about 8 miles away and 10 floors off the ground. I upgrade storage devices every 2-3 years, so I get fresh copies periodically. Every 3 to 6 months, I load everything to a new set of drives and then bring the old pair home.
4) I have some tertiary backups in the form of smugmug and vimeo uploads.
Here's a shot of my computer as of this morning:
The new RAID 6 array consists of the 5 drives on the lower left and the 3 lower drives to the right of them. The next drive up is an SSD I use for the OS and some cache files. The two drives above them are a pair of 2TB drives I striped to use as a scratch drive.
In the top left are a Blu-ray reader/DVD writer, a drive that lets you pop in internal 3.5" drives, and a Blu-ray writer.
In the top right are an i7 930 (2.8ghz), 12 gig of RAM, a Quadro FX 3800 video card, an a new LSI 9265-8i RAID controller.
This is what my Windows Explorer looks like for "My Computer"
Those "removable" disks are from a USB 3 card reader and my monitor (which has a built in USB 2 card reader).
The "extra" BD-ROM drive is a virtual drive from Daemon Tools.
The "IronKey" drive is a secured USB drive. I use that to store my Quicken files and my personal documents (tax files, bills, receipts, paystubs, etc).
I just set up the "scratch" drive this morning. I'm thinking about partitioning it into a few different drives to cut down on fragmentation. I'm also thinking that by partitioning, I can force the most performance sensitive data to the outer portion of the disk and pick up a little extra performance. Then again, I'm thinking about grabbing a bag of chips and watching some football instead.
