As with a lot of projects there are often overruns, mis planning and issues that arise later in the project that necessitate the changing of certain key assumptions. This project is no exception, lucky for me I had the ability to identify some of the issues before hand and was able to get the bulk of my work done in the initial time frame. Here is a rundown of some of the issues I ran into that necessitated me scrambling to find fixes at the expense of rush processing fees/shipping costs/restocking fees.

Problem: Storing lots of media files takes a lot of space

After archiving a few DVD's and using that small (20 or so disks) as a sample I was able to see that my raid array would be a bit on the small side. Also I moved my configuration from a RAID5 array to a RAID6 array. The reason was because I was using consumer grade drives in my setup, which after a bit of research I found had some issues being used in a raid array. Issues like kicking out of the array causing it to be rebuilt over and over :(.

I've always liked buying new hardware and assembling new computers, it is my favorite part of a new build. Doing the research and figuring out the right components for my particular situation, just something about it that I have always liked.

I have been formulating my requirements for this particular project for quite some time. Mulling over the benefits of pulling the trigger sooner, or waiting and doing it later.

My house has modest computer needs. We have a few computers with what I consider quite a bit of data (maybe 1.5 TB total). Our computer sittuation looks like this:

• Laura's Computer: Mainly used for day to day tasks as well as Photoshop work for her business and her hobbies. She shoots with a Canon 5D and has been doing so for a while. When you figure in scans from her film days she is quickly approaching the 1TB storage limit on her computer. Laura's data is stored on Striped (RAID 1) array of 2x 1TB drives, she is rapidly approaching full on those. I should note, it is Windows Raid, and her desktop runs Vista Ultimate x64, which if my experience with windows RAID means it could be difficult to recover if, for example, we were forced to reformat and reinstall everything. Though it is protected against a single hard drive failure. She does NOT back up her data (I know begin the boo's now).
• Larry's Computer: This is mostly used for day to day stuff. I too dabble in photography, but to a much lesser degree then Laura. I have probably 100-200 GB's of photos. I also have a lot of music. I like to buy CD's and immediately rip them to my computer (I've been bitten before by the random car theft leaving me musicless). Because of my anal retentive OSS nutcase nature I tend to rip things in a lossless open format, so my cd's are ripped into FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec). I have some .MP3 files, but for the most part I'm a FLAC man. My music Collection runs about 100GB's. Throw in my willingness to support the Ubuntu project by seeding torrents of the latest various releases, as well as other .iso's I have accumulated over time and you can see I have a mish mash of data, running around 300GB). Most of this data is spread accross 2x 250GB hard drives that operate completly independently of each other. I occassionally backup the pair to a third 400GB drive that I keep in my case, but it is only irregular and manual backups. This is just on my main computer!
• My Laptop: There is not much stored here, because I am frequently reconfiguring and reinstalling things to tweak it a bit, i'm a glutton. I do on occasion copy things down from my main machine to play around with them, so lets say... 100GB here (an overestimate I would say). My laptop has one 250GB SSD drive in it, it is not backed up at all.

As you can see your storage needs are not insignificant. And adding some data redundancy via a recoverable RAID solution seems like a good idea. So that is what I decided to do!

I have been looking for a way to expand my storage capabilities at home while adding in a layer of redundancy to protect my data. Data Robotics offers the DROBO products that seem to be a good fit. What I like most is that I don't have to worry about what RAID level I'm going to be using (I was thinking of doing a raid 5 array) and I can dynamically add/remove drives to add to my storage ability, or replace drives, without taking the array down. I would LOVE to be able to do this with Linux and a small cheap server. It would likely compare price wise to what Data Robotics is offering with the DROBO line, but would allow me to use ext4 for example to have drive sizes over 2TB (about the size of total storage for which I am looking to start). Data Robotics does not officially support using a drobo on Linux, which is philisophically an issue for me. If they would add support for a linux filesystem that supports sizes > 2TB I would likely stop considering building my own NAS solution and start considering DROBO.