Imagine that you’ve got a 3TB hard drive that is the primary backup for a computer system that is now doing quite a bit of photo processing and video production… and you start to see very scary data errors coming from the drive!
Imagine also that you’ve got a 750GB hard drive in the laptop that is completely stuffed and dangerously low on available disk space. And before you say it…yes, there is a lot of space on the C drive but that’s just asking Windows to stomp all over that data *WHEN* (and not *IF*) it eats the C drive and trashes your OS install…never store anything you care about on a C drive…EVER!!!
Now you know why that new eight-bay enclosure has been hooked up to my computer and the top five bays are loaded with 4TB Western Digital Red hard drives. The enclosure supports two sets of four drives in various possible RAID (redundant array of inexpensive disks) configurations.
In the top of the box, the rightmost set of four drives have been built as a RAID-5 array which allows 12TB of the 16TB total disk space to be used for data. RAID-5 stripes the data that is written across the disks in the array and adds a parity bit so that if any drive in the array fails, it can be replaced and rebuilt using the other three disks making RAID-5 very fault tolerant.
The left-most drive up top is currently being used as a 4TB stand-alone drive as well the three empty bays below (though it could easily support a second RAID array if necessary). This JBOD (just a bunch of disks) configuration allows me plenty of scratch disk space for doing those huge video rendering jobs with multiple write paths which should speed it up noticeably. Those three bottom bays will be getting some transplanted drives soon once the controller card is replaced as the first one has a bad connector port.
The critical backup drive has already been replicated to the standalone drive which will then be replicated to the array so that there are two good backups in play, one of which is fault tolerant. When the new controller arrives, the good drives that were previously in the stack on top of the DVD burners (see this link) will be transplanted into the enclosure so that we’ll be rocking close to 20TB or more online and available so that I can clean up drive E and stop Diskeeper from whining at me about insufficient space for defragmenting!
In other words…WOO HOO!!!!
