Big storage

I usually find that I bring back about 30GB of images from a trip. And since I am shooting a lot at the moment I have about 400GB of RAW files (and growing to backup). At present I have two copies of these on my hard drives and then a third copy of 4.5GB of favourites from each trip backed up twice on DVD.

This is not a perfect system, although I have never lost a file, and I want to get something that will look after me for the next few years. The system I am looking at is a ReadyNAS NV raid system:

http://www.infrant.com/products_ReadyNAS_NV.htm

A friend of mine recommends this one - loaded with 500GB disks. But before I fork out I thought I'd ask if anyone has this, or has something similar they'd recommend instead.

When responding please remember I am an underwater photographer! This means I won't understand tekky answers, I want a reasonably off the shelf solution as I don't have the skills to build something myself, oh and my budget isn't huge as this is being funded out of profit earned from shooting underwater (and that money also has to pay for groceries)!

Thanks

Alex

p.s. Spending this much on storage would sure pay for a lot of film and processing.

Hello Alex,

I generally recommend the LaCie storage products, here's a link:

http://www.lacie.com/products/family.htm?id=10007

At $2,699 the LaCie S2S 2.5 TB 5 Disk RAID is a great product.

http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10458

Thanks Dave, I have Lacie hard drives at the moment. So I am a fan too!

Alex

Far be it from me, Dr C, to tell Dr M to use the search function , but there has been a small amount of discussion of the Infrant products here on Wetpixel. They are generally pretty well thought of. I'm planning to buy one when I get back from Cocos, at the moment I have a 200 GB NAS drive from Maxtor that everything is stored on, but this is filling fast.

The newer X6 series Infrant stuff (like the one you are looking at) has an advantage in that you can incrementally add drives as your needs increase, you could start with 2 x 500 GB drives, and add more as you need them, as you do so the available space just automagically increases.

I currently use ReadyNas, and I find them to be amazing. Just shove them on the network, and they just work.

OS is on a CF card, so if the drives fail you can still manage the volume.

I have the ReadyNas 600, with 4 x 400GB drives in it.

Far be it from me, Dr C, to tell Dr M to use the search function

Yes, he could use the “search function†but it’s so much more fun to pick someone else’s brain instead.

Dr M, ReadyNas is an awesome product. I have a few friends who use them.I unfortunately cannot because I need 183 MB/s minimum for video capture.

If you don't want to go with a prepackaged solution, you can also put together your own RAID system via software RAID.

Check out this product if you don't want to deal with networking.(The RT5 is a RAID which you can use with your firewire800/400/USB2/sata. All you need do is just set up for a RAID 1 + 0 backup or RAID 5 and you're good to go)

Wiebetech RT5

Also make sure you use the new Maxtor Maxline III 7V300F0 300GB drives. They are the fastest drives around and best bang for buck. If you must go 500gb go with the Western Digital WD5000KS Caviar SE16, I'd rather get a bigger enclosure and use the 300GB.

There are a few other brands which have the same concept. My best suggestion is head down to Imperial College and pull the cutest bird out of the computer science class and have her set it up. You can skip the Cheltenham girls, a bit too young for you.

Dr C...you fell for the oldest trick in the forum book, ask first and take a cyber beating.

In my defence, Craig, I did check through the posts in the Storage forum before posting! Thanks for the link. And I am greatly encouraged if I am looking at a brand that Eric uses - (when we were in Florida Eric actually mentionned that he knows the guys who develop the RAID software or something)!

Also, thanks Drew for your confidence in my pulling power! But I'm not quite the irresistable ladies' man in real life - which is why I make internet posts about storage! Also my girlfriend (who is asleep, damn this jetlag) might not be totally chuffed with your solution.

Alex

Also, thanks Drew for your confidence in my pulling power! But I'm not quite the irresistable ladies' man in real life - which is why I make internet posts about storage! Also my girlfriend (who is asleep, damn this jetlag) might not be totally chuffed with your solution.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Dr M, if you've been to Imperial College, then you'll know why I don't doubt your pulling power with girls there... my sister went there too.

I thought we had established that switching to Canon would get you all the birds you would need (sleeping or otherwise?)

And the Infrant RAID system is a good network system. My only bitch about it is that it's not fast enough for my needs. That's why I built my own RAID array. For photo archiving, the Infrant system is more than enough. In fact, you should hint to eric that his NAV 600 is not fast enough for uncompressed HD and he should upgrade, selling you his old system.

Hi Alex,

Good choice! That's the unit I'm going with as well. I talked to Eric about this a lot on the Bahamas trip too.

Even with a NAS, an offsite backup of everything is still important in case of fire, natural disaster, or virus. The ReadyNAS is capable of doing backups to a USB hard drive that you can take offsite and has a "one touch" button for doing these backups. With one or two 500gb portables to take offsite, and the ReadayNAS NV at home, you've got a good backup system. Albeit expensive - something like $1,800 for the NAS and another $600 for two 500gb USB drives.

Cheers

James

I was planning on getting a RAID, so here's a question for you guys.

what's the difference between the NAS with the 4 drives and the LaCie with 5 drives. Do you get better protection with the extra drive? Is it worth the cost?

Just thinking out loud, the NAS with 4 drives plus an extra external USB drive would give you some portable redundancy, so is that the way to go?

Hey Eric, any chance of another group buy?

The NAS= Network Attached Storage, whereby you connect it as part of your network server. It runs independently from your computer. It has a lot more flexibility in use, running your media players (WMV,WMA etc). My old desktop is actually set up as a NAS networked to the HDTV, DVD player and Hi Fi

The La Cie is just a RAID array(or JBOD) array connected to your computer. It is dependent on a computer to work.

Bit the bullet...

This thing looks like a Mini-Me version of my G5!

Alex

Ha look at the lens flare you added to make it look purty !!

Bit the bullet...

 

This thing looks like a Mini-Me version of my G5!

 

Alex

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

alex,

congrats on the new baby

where did you buy it? have been trying to find a reseller here in europe?

/paul

Just thinking out loud, the NAS with 4 drives plus an extra external USB drive would give you some portable redundancy, so is that the way to go?

 

Hey Eric, any chance of another group buy?

It might be hard to find an external USB drive big enough to back up your entire RAID volume.

And speaking of RAIDs, one of my drives (in my main 300GB x 8 server) just died. It's in the process of rebuilding, but even with RAID 5, some of my files were corrupted and I couldn't read the volume until I ran CHKDSK on it.

I now recommend loading hot spares into RAID configurations, so when a drive dies the RAID is automatically rebuilt.

Lawrence - are you really interested in a group buy? I can try to set up another one...

Eric,

i'm definitely ready for a group buy.

i was about to call newegg to purchase, but if you can get a group buy, i'll do that instead.

I now recommend loading hot spares into RAID configurations, so when a drive dies the RAID is automatically rebuilt.

can you explain that for a layman?

also, if the files are corrupted, isn't RAID 5 supposed to help prevent that? if you chkdsk that will just tell you there are corrupted files, but you won't be able to recover your corrupted files right?

A hot spare is just a hard disk that is unused until one of the hard disks of your raid volume dies. At that time the unused hard disk automatically replaces the faulty disk, which can take several hours. During that time you system will run in a 'degraded' mode, which usually means it runs slower. If you loose a second harddisk while running in degraded mode (and failures do tend to happen in clusters) you will loose everything.

But no matter if you have RAID, or even a hot spare, these systems rely on software and hardware that can, and does fail. It is not uncommon for raid systems (I happen to manage hundreds of them) to just go all screwy on you with no chance of a full recovery.

I would personally not rely on the 'safety' of a raid volume alone to protect what I count as some of my most valued posessions, my photos. Not only do you have the above mentioned problems, but you can have a fire, or even more common, plain old theft. All those shiny buttons look really tempting. No amount of raid is going to get your images back then. Close your eyes, imagine you coming home, and your tv, your dvd player, your computer, and everything around your computer including your raid system is stolen. No more photos.

I would always keep a copy someplace else.

Cor

A hot spare is just a hard disk that is unused until one of the hard disks of your raid volume dies. At that time the unused hard disk automatically replaces the faulty disk, which can take several hours. During that time you system will run in a 'degraded' mode, which usually means it runs slower.  If you loose a second harddisk while running in degraded mode (and failures do tend to happen in clusters) you will loose everything.

Thanks, cor, for the description.

The drive I lost yesterday is still rebuilding. for a 8 x 300GB RAID5 setup, it is taking my server 30 hours to rebuild the failed drive. 6 more hours to go.

Chkdsk recovered the "FOUND" files, but I have no way of easily putting them back into the directories to which they belong. So i'll probably just do a big restore from my backup volume...

Depending on the software, it's sometimes possible to configure rebuild speed, favoring either speed of rebuilding, or performance of the raid. I guess for home use systems the manufacturer finds some kind of middle grounds, probably leaning towards raid performance assuming you wont have 2 disks fail. Im not surprised it can take more than a day.

Glad to see you have a backup! During my PNG trip I had a travel HD break on me. I was able to restore most of the images with some headaches, but I ended up with a useless bunch of filenames

Downloader PRO to the rescue I got DL PRO to seperate everything out based on day, camera comment field (Julie and I use our names in the comment field) and some other stuff, making the whole thing workable again.

Cor