[Discussion] OT: Hardware Failure begets Mac Mini a bit of a rant

[BillN]

Okay, time for my $.02:

One of the problems we all face are large and larger file sets - mine 
run around 900GB, mostly video. I have been running a 3 500gb drive 
raid5 setup (931GB), and another 3 drive 750gb raid5 setup (1.4TB).

One of the problems ($$) in backing up over a TB to tape is the 
substantial expense of both the drive and media, not to mention the 
requirement to physically change and rotate tapes, store them carefully, 
etc. ad nauseam. Tapes have failures too - I found out the hard way.

OTOH, drives are very inexpensive now, $90 for 1TB at Newegg, and a pair 
of those will hold a bunch. But you need to set up a monitor to notify 
you if a drive fails, and then replace it quickly before another fails. 
So after a while, a spare drive on the shelf is cheap insurance. An 
online spare is more secure, but it too will wear out.

Ya pays yer money and takes yer chances.

This weekend I have been collecting all of my smaller drives scattered 
in systems that have been superceeded. I collected 5 - 250GB drives plus 
2- 300GB drives, stuck all of them in a too small chassis, and fired up 
my new numbercruncher, a Phenom 920 for my climateprediction.net 
systems, currently ten running. But I expect to shutdown a couple as I 
upgrade others to quads. All of this stuff runs on Linux with software 
raid, no raid controllers needed.

But in that 920 system is another 931GB raid5 (one disk failed). So I'll 
be backing up the first 931 raid5 with this and critical info from both 
on my other 1.4TB raid5.

All in all it may be close to as expensive as a tape, and not 
invulnerable to fire, but that too can be dealt with by moving one of 
the raid systems into the garage, now that I've rewired it.

The advantages of instant backup and redundancy, plus the ability to 
upgrade drives and systems w/o having files unavailable is a real bonus. 
As I get further into recording OTA TV in HD, I'll grow the raid 
systems, maybe even upgrade to raid6, which is two extra drives, so you 
can survive a two drive failure for really serious reliability.

This approach is not everyone's solution, nor is it to the length I have 
taken. But it is a valid approach for almost any backup need, small 
business included. And one of the nice things is you can build it 
incrementally as I have over the last several years, using older systems 
too slow for today's graphics demands.

Hope this helps,
BillN