Monday, January 15, 2007

Geek Storage

Well. Things are never perfect are they? But at least things are improving. At least I have decided how to store files in my office. I have bought 4 of the Infrant Readynas NV+ storage casings. In each casing I have put in 4 x 500GB drives. Now the box is hardware RAID5. Meaning, that there is some clever redundancy somewhere and if one of the drives fails, I can replace the drive and all my information is safe. As one drive is needed for redundancy, I have 1.5 terabytes of storage in one box right now. I have fitted out 2 boxes with drives which means I now have 3 Terabytes of storage online. I bought another 2 boxes but have not fitted them out because there is a special offer on for the boxes. The list price of each box is $1,280. The special offer ended yesterday, but it was selling at $1,080. So I saved $800 on 4 boxes.

I have fitted out 3 Teras of storage because I am archiving my work and I need that much storage right now. At the moment, the best price per gig is the 300GB drives, but in the long I figured it is better to go with the 500GB drives. One thing to note though, the 1TB drives are now out. And the price of hard drives should come down by the middle of the year. If I bought 500GB drives then, I would have 6 Teras of storage online. But if I just wait till when I need the storage, I may just buy 750GB drives. Yeah, it all sounds crazy, but there is a method to my madness.

One unexpected cost to come out of this is that I bought a 16 port gigabit switch box. The Readynas boxes use gigabit ethernet. Considering the amount of information I am shifting around, the gigabit exthernet makes sense. The good news for Mac uses is that the Ethernet ports are gigabit ready! PC users can buy a pci gigabit adpator for $49.

Now, if you understand all this, then you are truly a geek too.

Now, if only that bloody archiving of my old work gets done. I have been waiting for over a year for this archiving to be completed.
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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi, take a look at a feature-rich online service that helps you to do hassle-free backups and restores of files and folders. It’s called IBackup. No need to send advertisements or bring in more customers so that you get additional storage space.

With their well-known product ‘IBackup for Windows’ you can select important files and folders to back them up or allow the application automatically select the most common user data. Then you can either backup them up immediately or schedule backup of selected data for a frequency, date and time of your choice. With its Windows like user interface, you can drag and drop files to back them up or to restore them. You can backup and restore all kinds of files, including open files like Outlook or Quicken files. The application is compatible with Windows 98 and above.

IBackup for Windows transfers only modified portions of your files to ensure a quick backup. You can receive desktop or email notifications on your scheduled backups or restores. You have the option to keep the 'Mirror Path' (default) so that the entire source path can be duplicated for your backups to avoid any overwriting.

To make things easy, they have ‘IDrive', an application that maps your online IBackup account as a network drive on your computer. You can then drag and drop files to the IBackup account from the Windows explorer. To stream multimedia content like video and audio using your favorite media player, you can use ‘IDrive Multimedia. Simply move your music and video files into your IBackup account and double-click on your multimedia files, it will open up your media player and plays the multimedia file.

IBackup accounts are compatible with most FTP clients on most platforms providing a powerful flexible tool to transfer files. You can also access IBackup account with a product called ‘ILite’, using handhelds such as Blackberry, PocketPC and Treo. For users who wish to backup on character sets other than US/English, IBackup now offers the flexibility to opt for the new IBackup for Windows - International Edition.

1/18/2007 8:28 PM
Heng said...

HI Chris,

Thanks for your reply. It costs US$9.95 to store 5 gigs of info a month. I already have 2 teras worth of info, or 400 times 5 gigs. It will cost me US$3,980 a month to save this much storage. When I hit 6 teras it will cost just under US$12,000 a month to use this service. I cannot afford that. My entire 6 tera storage system will cost me less than one month's rental iwth IBackup.

1/18/2007 8:49 PM

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