First of all, I'd like to thank y'all for the very informative thread. I hope other people find it useful.
On my end, after mulling things over and feeling quite lazy about the linux rtfm requirement, I've decided to go with a pins-and-needles-and-mac setup. I'm going to use firewire drives attached to an apple box (a mini or an old g4 tower would do), and add drives as needed. I chose firewire over usb 2.0 because of performance considerations and because it seems that the firewire approach lends itself more readily to a large external array. There will be a long firewire cable with repeaters leading to that distant closet if I use "my box", or an ethernet cable running out to the router if I get a dedicated apple box to sit in the closet with the drives; the drives will hang off a firewire hub with 30" cables so as to shorten the cable distance between any two nodes as well as reducing clutter. Each new hard drive will be cloned and the clone (sans enclosure) will be kept in a separate building; I'll deal with the "partially-filled" drive in some way, but I'm not so worried about the fragility of its data compared to that of the rest. Since the music collection consists of a monotonically increasing filesystem, this fairly brainless backup strategy should be good enough. One definite shift in my thinking that happened thanks to this thread is that now I will not assume that RAID protects my data for the long-term as securely as I'd like. I've tried to be picky with the enclosures for these firewires; I've ordered one of each of these to see which one I'll stick with for the long haul: http://www.supergooddeal.com/product_p/pm-350u2-bk--xx.htm http://www.censuspc.com/product.php?productid=3036&cat=72&page=1 The first one is smaller and less expensive, whereas the second looks like "good engineering" and I like its big fan. I'll try them both and take it from there. I'm going to need a case that is a kissing cousin of "hot swappable" for the cloning of the barebone drives; hopefully both of these can fulfill that function, so that the one that doesn't get to be the array model can still be the cloner. :) Wrt other external choices, the pair of seagates that I've been using are quiet enough to be in the listening room and they have worked more or less flawlessly for me: http://www.seagate.com/products/retail/external/usbfirewire (one of them had the inexplicable dismount a few weeks ago and OS X wouldn't recognize it initially but a quick look at it with a disk utility repaired it without a problem). They look pretty, too. However they do heat up a little bit (I wouldn't stack them as the picture suggests, but use them vertically and keep a gap between them). I also began to think that in the long term, if the case fails, I may have a bit of difficulty extracting the hard drive from within... that's when I realized that if I go with a barebone hard drive and a separately-chosen enclosure, I double the points of failure and should one component fail, I still get to keep the other hardware component (assuming the failure is not as catastrophic as, say, a fire). Aside from the brainless simplicity of this setup, I'm hoping that it'll perform better than the readynas as a slimserver platform, and of course at about $50/slot it is cheaper than the $600-700 for the four-drive readynas. btw if I'd done the linux box in the closet path, I would have picked this case http://www.thermaltake.com/xaserCase/armor/va8000swa/va8000swa.htm along with these sexy thangs, http://www.thermaltake.com/xaserCase/icage/icage.htm Of course this would have busted Pat's $400 budget. :) Cheers, Ariel -- trebejo ------------------------------------------------------------------------ trebejo's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=730 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=18555 _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
