Doing sufficient backups, building virtual machines, and storing my transient video collection “on-line” requires storage, storage, and more storage. With three computers now getting sufficient backups to give me moderate peace of mind, I needed more storage than my RAID1 NAS (network addressable storage) was ready to serve. I had 2 750GB drives but RAID1 used those as mirrors so I only got the real capacity of one drive (and in reality, you never get 100% of a disk drive and so it was more like 700GB).

Today I added 2 more 750 GB drives. The system reconfigured itself for RAID5 so now I have 2 TB (yes, TB = terabytes). So, it should be a while before I run out of storage and more important, with RAID5 I have hot swappable storage - if any one disk drive should ever fail.

the down side now is there is no way I will ever have a fallback for the NAS. It has become a single point of failure if - unlikely as it may seem - the entire thing should bite the dust. (I truly hope that writing that was not asking for trouble.)

BTW: for those with slow-speed internet, I apologize for the 360KB image. I tried to make it smaller but it started at 2.7MB so I feel I did “OK” when all things are considered. For those asking “how”, all I can say is; “GIMP is one of the most amazing photo manipulation tools I have ever used - and I’ve used Photoshop and Photoshop Elements for years … and GIMP is free !

Related tangests ...   Keyless security ... and humor   Hand written post   David Pogue Says it better than me ...

Posted in Backups, Computers, Performance, Security |

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