the plummeting price of computer memory

Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker

i bought a used MacPlus around 1987 or so, maybe 1988 at latest. the guy who bought it had also bought a 40 MEG hard drive, which he paid $750 for.

think about that... 40 megs of storage for $750.

fast forward.... i just updated my OS, and needed to do a clean install. My S: drive(s) (a Raid 5 array) needed to be backed up just in case,. i have mozy to back up, but I got a stand-alone 2T hard drive so i could just have the files handy. i copied my C: and S: drives over onto it.

i paid $139 for 2 terabytes of storage.

converting to 1988 pricing, i find my 2T hard drive to be worth about $39 MILLION dollars in 1988.

off to work on my time machine. i wonder if i can find a scsi connection that will work to bring with me

Jeffersonian

The average person has as much computing power on his/her desk today as most of the military did in the 1960s. It's amazing.

You do RAID 5 on your home machine? Do you have a lot of stuff that you can't afford to lose?

Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker

it's my work machine....
funny thing is as i was backing up, i found one of the drives had some issues. it did it's job, because i never noticed and everything is backed up on the fly.

but now it's dangerous, because we need to find out if one of the drives needs to be replaced.

it's a BOXX machine. their support is legend. i am going to call them tomorrow, and if we determine that one one of the drives needs to be replaced, it will be on my doorstep in the morning, and i will swap out the dead one for the new. and then the info will all be rebuilt.

i know of a guy who called a week after his warranty ran out, and they sent him a DVD drive to replace his dead one, gratis.

when my DVD drive got stuck in the open position, i had one here the next morning on the doorstep.

great company

Fidel

Silly question...why RAID 5 instead of RAID 1 in your situation?

Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker

went looking for the specs. could't find em. might not be RAID 5. i'd be hard pressed to swear to it. thought it was.

i have three drives which appear as a single s: drive, and they have redundancy enough that i could go in and take one offline, or jam a butterknife in there and destroy it, and i wouldn't see any issue. the other two drives would rebuild the info lost from the damaged drive.

i'd then have all my data, but not see any loss in performance or notice anything was wrong.

in fact, i am gonna talk with the tech guy tomorrow to determine if i actually HAD an issue, because i have a disk showing 'errors'. if so, then i was protected, because i still have my info. but the downside is that i wasn't given any notice. if i do have a damaged drive, then any new info isn;'t being protected.

kind of a problem, frankly.

i honestly think it was described to me as RAID 5, but i don't really know. there's a 3ware driver in between me and the drives, and it just does whatever it wants to... as long as i see the files, i'm happy.

Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker

yeah. a little wikipedia surfing and i'm sure it's not RAID1, which is nothing more than having two identical drives.

i have three drives that "look" like one to me when i go to save a file, and together their total memory available is only what i'd have with two. the three drives together contain enough redundancy that any single one can be taken offline at any time, and no data is lost, and further, all the data is rebuilt on the remaining two.

beyond that it's voodoo to me. :S

Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker

i back up off line, and i have a cheap 2T hard drive.

so i have physical back-up, the redundancy on-the-fly of the RAID array, and the belt/suspenders of online back-up

the online storage is emergency only, because they'd have to deliver a coupla few DVS to me for me to reinstall it all.

the RAID set up should cover me for damage to the data alone, but of course not if my studio burns or something, that's what the on-line back-up is for

Fidel

Sounds like RAID 5 to me, but RAID 1 is really just as good in your situation - everything is mirrored so anything you change is instantly written to two physical drives (though you only see one).

The difference is a speed boost and you get more storage for your money, but as cheap as storage is now it isn't much of an issue. In RAID 5 you lose 1/3 of your overall storage capacity, and it takes 3 drives to incorporate instead of 2. Both are fault tolerant and can re-build a failed drive. In R1 you lose the capacity one of your drives, but don't need to buy the 3rd. Back when sizable SCSI drives cost $700+ this was an issue, nowadays not so much.

Kinda a moot point, I was just curious to see R5 in your situation.

Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker

my machine is actually almost 3 years old...

i got faster than normal drives, because i write huge files (sometimes 1g or more), and the raid 5 was a little more cost effective than two bigger drives.

when i spoke last week to my rep, he did say that the drives i had are so much cheaper now, and i have something like four bays still, that if i wanted i could always add some memory.

at the time, i could get more memory for less with three instead of two, as you know.

who are you that are so wise in the ways of science and know so much about the airspeed velocity of a RAID5 array? you get into this stuff for your corporate storage?

i have to call today to get the driver for my 3ware controller. when i called with a totally different issue, he was working on a guy's computer that had the same exact setup as mine and was also experiencing a drive with errors, and a driver upgrade.

this stuff bores me, frankly... hahaha

Fidel

I configured/built servers and managed a NOC in a former life. Back then it was cool and all the chicks would dig it. Now they're all a bunch o' geeks.

Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker

i didn't think you were smart enough for something like that. interesting. ...very interesting

Fidel

I wasn't smart enough, which is how I got to where I am today.

Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker

hahahha
nicely turned