Fire has been running out of room on her drives for the last year or so.
After a series of drive failures in the early 2000s, we started going with the mantra of "RAID 1 RAID 1 RAID 1". The dev server had a raid, both of our desktops had raid cards and dual drives. When I moved to OSX, this got a little more expensive and a little harder. So instead, I used cron and rsync with a firewire drive instead of RAID. Fine.
The trouble with not using RAID is that if your software stops working or the backups fail and you don't get notified properly, things go bad. And the thing about backup systems is that the simple fact is that the longer it has been since a failure, the less likely the backups are to be any good because you aren't paying as much attention to them. Very sad.
We have not had any super awful data losses in quite a while, with all our backing up, offsite copies, and raids. When a drive starts to make funny noises, we replace it immediately.
But increasing the size of the raided drives in fire's machine would cause a lot of trouble, since her system is working fine and going in and putting in a new raid is likely to just upset the fragile, brittle thing that is a Windows machine. Also, we didn't want to replace it, we just wanted to add capacity and move a couple of things onto their own 200gig partitions.
Specifically, we need space for the image archives. Although we are not yet done with the first public beta of the new image system, we are getting near there. And we're also accumulating photos at a very fast clip. And the photos people send and we take are getting bigger. If we had more disk space, we'd even take higher resolution photos.
We spent a lot of time looking at options for hardware. We considered NAS (network attached storage) solutions like the Buffalo Terra Station (includes a 4 drive raid and can do raid5 and supposedly gigabit ethernet). We bought two different NAS boxes in 2004, total crap, returned both. I read all the reviews of all the boxes I could find.
I have a friend who works at Mirra. I really like their product, in theory, but it isn't really what we need. It is really not designed to be used as a main working drive and is a backup and remote-access appliance. Great, but oriented towards people who don't run a FreeBSD server at home to do services like that.
What we 'need' is an enterprise level file server, RAID 1 or RAID 5, with gigabit ethernet. Oh and we'd need to upgrade our network to gigabit and put gigabit into fire's machine, since she does most of the image editing and management. Unfortunately, that's all REALLY EXPENSIVE. Real NAS RAID5 solutions with good bandwidth are more in the 3-5K USD range. We were hoping to stay under $500.
We looked at hooking up firewire drives to our FreeBSD 5.x dev server, but the network speed across 100mbit networks is really just too slow for trying to zoom through images.
Unfortunately all of the reviews of all of the consumer / small biz NAS devices indicate that they are slow. Not only because of ethernet, but because they were under powered in the brain. The Buffalo TerraStation is not really able to pump bits at gigabit speeds, so the fact that they 'support' gigabit ethernet seems moot.
In the end, the most practical solution still seems to be to put firewire drives on fire's main machine and share that via SMB (windows file sharing). That allows her to have very fast access and still allow me and the dev server access to the files, albeit over ethernet.
There are a couple of devices that have become consumer-level in the last year that have RAID built into a firewire or USB2 enclosure. Unfortunately, some of these only do RAID 0 (Iomega XL Desktop (why would they put 4 drives in the box and only do raid 0?), which is not at all what we need.
After doing a lot of searching, we ended up with trying a Maxtor One Touch III RAID 1 drive. They come in two sizes (March 2006), 2x500GB drives in one enclosure and 2x300GB drives and two configurations (RAID 0 only and RAID 0 OR RAID 1).
The main things that recommend this box is that it is small (twice the size of standard external firewire drives packed together), does firewire 800, fw 400, and usb2, and is supposed to be quiet. It does RAID 1 and RAID 0. We are just looking for data safety, speed is good but not as important as reliability.
So, we bought one at Fry's. Unfortunately, we had been looking at the box for the terabyte and then decided on the 600GB version, which was almost 400 USD cheaper. The 1000GB was chepear per GB, but there is something that happens when a piece of technology gets over $500 USD: we don't buy it.
Sadly, when we got home, we discovered that Maxtor makes two nearly identical versions of the 600GB One Touch III, one that does RAID0 only and one that does RAID0 and RAID 1. Guess which one we got? Yup, the wrong one. The box was "clear" in that it didn't say anywhere on it that it did RAID 1, but the documentation was not as clear. It said RAID-1 in some places. Wasted an hour on verifying it was the wrong device.
When we went back to Fry's, we discovered that they don't sell the 600GB version with RAID 1. We looked again at all options and decided, again, that this was the unit we wanted to try out.
In the end, we need, today, March 2006, a couple hundred gig of fast space and it needs to be reliably protected from hardware failure. As of today, the choices appear to be either a single external firewire drive hooked to fire's machine and then (probably) cron'd rsync running on the dev server OR (preferrably) this RAID-1 unit hooked to fire's machine and then incremental backups.
So, we chose the Maxtor RAID-1 firewire One Touch III : Turbo Edition, 2x500GB. To read about that drive, see the next post : Maxtor One Touch III Review and Disassembly.
Posted by Earth at March 8, 2006 01:32 PM