Re: Archival cost of hard drives

It contains 8 FireWire drive bays and a power supply, but doesn't have a
RAID controller or anything.  I have it configured as two strings of four
drives -- four connected to my Mac for my music storage and four connected
to my PC for video.  I got it only because all my equipment is in a 19" rack
and it got messy having individual drive enclosures stacked on a rack shelf.
This thing fits perfectly in 4U.

On the Mac, I'm using MacOS X's software RAID feature to do two mirrored
volumes (I don't want to re-rip 600 CDs if I lose a drive).  I would have
done RAID-5, but there wasn't a software solution when I started the
project.

On the PC, they're just individual volumes so I can swap drives.

Here's the thing that's a real bummer.  The enclosure I got doesn't have a
FireWire hub in it.  The drives daisy-chain, and the bridge boards lose
power if you unlock the drive bay to remove the tray.  This means that all
the drives "down stream" go offline, so it's hardly a hot-swap thing.  So
far this has not proven to be a problem, but if it ever does I'll be buying
a bus-powered FireWire hub and putting it inside the case.

I got the case from FireWireDirect.com, but this should NOT be construed as
an endorsement by Roku.

--Mike




> On Sun, 08 Aug 2004 11:59:24 -0700, Mike Kobb <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
>> At the moment, I just have two 250's in my FireWire 8-drive enclosure and
>> use this for all my HiPix recording...  Since I can't really record from
>> satellite, it gives me all the storage I need for weeks of saved-up HD, and
>> of course I can then stream to my HD1000 with StreamPlayer.
> 
> Can you me (us) more about this FireWire 8-drive enclosure. Can it do
> raid ? I was looking for another drive today and figured I would just
> daisy chain another firewire drive. Are the enclosures a better way to
> go ?
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------
Mike Kobb
Senior Software Engineer, Roku
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