Hi Dave,<div><br></div><div> I've not wanted to weigh in too early on this one because it can sound patronising to say "you don't need that", but a thought did occur to me when I read your last paragraph<br>
<br><div class="gmail_quote">On 25 June 2010 22:31, Dave Fisher <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:wylug-discuss@davefisher.co.uk">wylug-discuss@davefisher.co.uk</a>></span> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
In short, I don't 'need' all those videos, but I do 'want' ready<br>
access to them ... and CDs/DVDs won't 'cut it'.<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Which I can completely understand - I too like to keep multimedia, often far longer than needed, just because I want to. However, that kind of multimedia data is indeed not the kind of thing that raid is needed for - if you have a secure backup (be it DVDs, cloudspace like amazon s3 or another known solid archive), you may want to consider just using consumer-grade hard-disks in non-raid form.</div>
<div><br></div><div>One of my back-burner projects (of too many to mention) is a HFS system, I don't know if it'll ever get finished but I did get to proof of concept. This is what is used in hospitals for their high-resolution imaging systems - files are cached locally for a specific time period and then soft-offlined (nearlined) to archive storage when they are not being accessed and more space is needed in the cache. The result is slow access of archived data but if the systems are written correctly, there is predictability and the files can be pre-fetched.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Okay, that seems off on a huge tangent, but what it seems you might be looking for is a (somewhat manual) version of that - RAID for data that's not archivable and cache-backed archive for stuff you want ready access to but doesn't warrant the cost (and headaches that you've experienced twice already) of raid.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Hopefully food for thought anyway.</div><div></div></div><br></div><div>--</div><div>Martyn</div>