How Much Storage on Your Network?

[scb147]

I have 900GB... Only 320GB of that is in my HTPC. My desktop PC has a 320GB, and two 40GB drives, the 320GB is mainly for digital camera photos and digital camcorder videos (gotta love those hard drive camcorders!). Then my notebook and my wife's notebook have 60GB drives in them.

I also have a 60GB external drive as well. I have Windows XP loaded on it and when I have it connected to my notebook, it will boot off of it. My notebook has Ubuntu Linux on the internal drive.

[JonnyCam]

I guess combining the PC's together, I have over 1TB - but the missus wants me to buy a 1TB drive, just because she likes the name (Terror Bite)

She's a tad crazy I guess. Would people suggest going to a RAID config for my PVR machine? (what one gives redundancy? and does it take 2 x space to give the redundancy?)

[SuMo]

Would people suggest going to a RAID config for my PVR machine? (what one gives redundancy? and does it take 2 x space to give the redundancy?)

There are various types of Raid levels, Raid level 1 will make a duplicate of your data, so this would take twice the amount of space.
Raid level 4 uses all the drives combined for writing data except one that is used for parity. If one drive fails you replace it and the parity drive will check what's missing on the replaced drive and builds all the data back to original state. Raid level 5 does the same except the parity drive isn't a seperate drive but parity data is spread over all available drives.
There are a lot more Raid levels (0,1,2,3,4,5,6,10,50,0+1) read all about it here

A Raid is effective when 4 or more disks are used IMO, but opinions may vary

[Ted the Penguin]

There are various types of Raid levels, Raid level 1 will make a duplicate of your data, so this would take twice the amount of space.
Raid level 4 uses all the drives combined for writing data except one that is used for parity. If one drive fails you replace it and the parity drive will check what's missing on the replaced drive and builds all the data back to original state. Raid level 5 does the same except the parity drive isn't a seperate drive but parity data is spread over all available drives.
There are a lot more Raid levels (0,1,2,3,4,5,6,10,50,0+1) read all about it here

A Raid is effective when 4 or more disks are used IMO, but opinions may vary

ok sorry, but I am gonna correct you a bit :p (I do kinda work for a storage company )

RAID 0 is just striping, no parity, so it looks like a big fast standard disk, and if any of the drives in the set fail, there goes all your data.

RAID 1 is just mirroring, so it is like a carbon copy, there are two identical disks, and if you lose one, you have an exact backup (financial institutions like this), however, its not really faster (maybe a bit on reading)

RAID 3 and RAID 4 are extremely similar, they both have a dedicated parity drive, but the difference is the scale of parity, in RAID 3 it is done on a byte level, whereas RAID 4 does it at a block level. either way, you can lose a drive, and its no problem. it is somewhat faster than a standard disk, and gives you more available disk space, since you only lose one drive to parity, however your bottleneck is the parity drive, since ALL operations have to use that drive.

RAID 5 is like 3 and 4 in that it has one drive worth of parity in the set, however the parity is distributed across all drives, so the performance is usually higher.(same benefits as 3 + 4)

RAID 6 is just like RAID 5 except instead of one drive dedicated to parity, there are two, so twice the redundancy, thats always good, but not alot of people use RAID 6.

then you can combined RAID levels, like 0+1 (probably one of the most popular) it lets you create a bunch of mirrored pairs, and then stripe them all together. so if you had 10 drives you would create 5 RAID 1 arrays, then put them all in a RAID 0 array, and you could lose 5! drives, and still not lose any data... but you would also have half of your space wasted.

and then you have to worry about hardware vs. software: in a dedicated storage environment, there is no reason not to use software, since it doesn't matter if you are affecting anything else's performance. it is also much easier to recover from the failure of a disk controller, since you don't have to replace it with the exact same one you had before

[Squid]

no SAN? I make that stuff you know (well write software for it )

Cool, which one? I use alot of Dell/EMC stuff at work ( the Clariion Series ones ).

Squid

[Ted the Penguin]

Cool, which one? I use alot of Dell/EMC stuff at work ( the Clariion Series ones ).

Squid

that is what I make

[largelumox]

GBPVR machine, 820GB 320gb system disk:eek:

500GB for recordings....linked to NAS Server with Ubuntu Linux, 1.5TB raid 5 using mdadm software raid (4 x 500gb).....all music, photos, and some archived videos stored....daily rsync backups for all pc's

[SuMo]

ok sorry, but I am gonna correct you a bit :p

No problem , but what's the correction? I think I said the same but in a simple manner

(I do kinda work for a storage company )

EMC ? and you call this "kinda" ??? Don't be so humble.
Just curious, what's your line of work at EMC.

I (used) to deal a lot with Rorke Data people.

[Ted the Penguin]

sorry, no correction, just elaboration really, I thought something was wrong when I started my post (since I had forgotten the exact different between RAID 3 and 4) but then forgot to go back and change that part of my post, sorry

I am a software developer for midrange systems (Clariion, now called CX series) it used to be called Data General, before EMC bought it

[Carlito]

Whoops, read the poll wrong. Thought it was just on the pvr.
So I definitely voted wrong. :o screwed up the results
Should have voted for 1.1 to 2 TB instead of 100 to 500 GB