Photography & Stuff

Of course the first raid options I looked at were the prepackaged items from Buffalo, Infrant and a couple of lesser known names (like Thecus)I dug up on Newegg.com. These were attractive options because they are pretty much idiot proof. In my initial stages of searching I was a little put off that I had to buy disks with the units however with a little bit of work I was able to find diskless versions of each of these. So I started digging into the specs. Most of these systems have pretty modest specs, they are not powerhouses as they do not need to be playing demanding games nor do they need to be able to serve files to thousands of people at once. Still I have to admit I am a performance geek so I carefully considered each spec and decided what would work best for me. First I looked at the drive format; I already had several Western Digital 500GB RE2 SATA II hard drives laying around so I wanted to take advantage of that performance. To my surprise Many of the prepackaged options were limited to SATA I (150MB/s) controllers!

This is the original reason why I decided to investigate building my own file server. Now I am pre disposed to DIY projects. I should mention that subsequent to my research several companies have come out with newer options that support SATA II. I also have a hardwired Gigabit Ethernet network in my home so and onboard 10/100/1000 Network card was required several of the newer products also have this. The Infrant ReadyNas Pro however does not come in a diskless version and the base version is $2000! It is nice to have such a small form factor device but when I already have my own hard drives $2000 is a little above my Price Range. I also wanted a solution that wasn’t necessarily limited to only 4 or 5 hard drives. Now had I been starting from scratch then maybe I would have considered the benefits worth the Price Tag. As things were though however, I ruled out prepackaged solutions as either not having the Specifications I was looking for or being too expensive.

So I decided to build my own box. It seemed like a great idea since most modern motherboards (including my own Mac Pro Motherboard although I don’t have access) include raid 5 functionality. This opens up the possibility of basing the raid directly out of the motherboards BIOS! My other option would be to use a software Raid solution; in particular I looked into Linux ext3 raid 5, Freenas and openfiler. I also looked at Resync and Time Machine as ways of doubling up my data.

In the next Part I will continue talking about hardware options I considered. I’ll follow that up with writing about Linux vs. FreeBSD/FreeNas vs. Openfiler and my discovery of ZFS. I’ll probably give ZFS it’s own section and follow up with a conclusion. If there is not any information in any section I do not touch on please leave a comment and I will be glad to amend a section to include what you are looking for:)

Lately I have been thinking a LOT about safeguarding my data. I like many Americans probably are keeping more and more important data digitally. I have to think it is natural to have an inherent mistrust for the longevity of digital data. Which means that I have to start seriously considering measures to safeguard my information. I currently have 4 Western Digital RE2 500GB drives in a 0+1 raid in my Mac Pro. I chose the RE2 because of it’s purported enterprise level design standards. 0+1 Protects me against drive failure but not against accidental data loss or overwriting, for that you need a redundant storage system that indexes files at certain points in time.

For instance at my work we have Veritas backing up versions of files at 12 AM and PM every day on a 4 week rotation which means you can roll back a file or folder to any 12 hour interval in the last 24 days! This is an awesome solution but really that much redundancy (potenntially up to 48 versions of a file) is only practical for a work enviroment where most files are Word and Excel files. Most home users will want to back up larger media files which do not change much over time.

So I looked at a number of options:

Resync, Raid 5, Time Machine, and finally ZFS. Unfortunately for me apple decided to disable raid 5 on the Mac Pro even though it is supported on the motherboard! Instead they want you to buy a $1K Raid Card, Forget about that! For a long time I considered some raid 5 implementation to be my best bet.   In the next part of this article I will talk about the different variations of raid 5 solutions I looked at:)

So it has been a long time since I have written a blog.  That’s OK because I think I could count my readership on one hand.  I have been taking a lot of pictures lately of Hopewell Valley Central Highschool’s Boys Lacrosse team.  Tyler is the JV/(part time Varsity) goalie. Check the Pictures out at this Link:

http://www.jdlphotovideo.com/Gallery/Photography%20Gallery/Events/Sports/Hopewell%20Valley%20Lacrosse%202008/index.html

or Just go to www.jdlphotovideo.com and click on the link on the front page (although it may not be there much longer). Next year when Tyler is the starting Varsity goalie you can expect to see pictures of at least every single home game!

Stay tuned for my next entry about sfegaurding your pictures!