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Photo storage server?

M

MaxiKana

n00b
Joined
Aug 26, 2004
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3
As a Photographer and an ex overclocker I am a computer savvy, I've just lost the interest to dabble with computers these last few years... I've fallen off the horse so to say...

Anyway, currently I use a Macbook as my work machine, storing recent shoots on my laptops drive (which is backed up to a 500gb external drive a couple times a day) and when it starts to get full I move the photos to an external 1TB drive via firewire 400 which is then duplicated to an identical 1TB drive.

Now, the firewire drives are quite slow, I get around 20 MB/s Read/write speeds and they are filling up. And secondly I hate it when my entire system freezes for the couple of seconds that it takes for the drives to spin up from standby.

I'm planning on buying a m-ATX motherboard with the Intel G45 / ICH10R chipset which would work as the RAID controller. I'm planning to add 4 x 500 GB HDDs and run them in either RAID 5 or RAID 1+0 (not sure yet which). I'm planning to connect this computer to my mac via gigabit ethernet and connect my two firewire drives to the data server to work as backup for it. My question is will this give me similar file transfer speeds as the fw 400 drives, or will it be slower? What operating system should I chose for the data server? I was thinking of some linux distro and not windows (mainly because I don't like windows).

Or should I just stick with the FW drives?
 
WHS, dump the cheap raid and the small drives, rather get two 1tb's or two 1.5's and turn on data duplication.
 
The NAS will be more of a photo archive that is used daily than a backup, that is why I thought about going the NAS route since it would give me better performance than what I have now, or am I wrong?
 
you're correct properly configured nas on gigabit network can give you full speed of a hdd, in case of new drives that would be ~70+ MB/s
 
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Most NAS products have junky CPUs that can't saturate GigE, and some of them can't even do 100mbps, be careful if you plan to purchase one of these products, some of them will offer worse performance than your existing setup (though no more fiddling with FW cables and spinup delays might be worth it).

So like the others I'd recommend a dedicated PC for this task, either FreeNAS or WHS. Don't use the onboard RAID; *nix softraid is better, and WHS is the idiotproof/lazy option.
 
freeNAS is a decent linux distro you can boot from a USB key, so all your data is on the drives and its not used for the OS. Also supports software raid options, for data storage Raid 5 is fine aslong as you use enough drives, my preference is 4+1 or 8+1 to maximise spindle counts on full stripe writes.

Though WHS is nice to backup the OS's on your systems as well but has a cost attached and will likely need more powerful hardware.
 
and also consider home user switches will probably limit your speed to 60/80mb anyway, due to the cheaper asics used.
 
Avoid 500GB drives unless you can get them for $50 each. If not, just go with 1TB or 1.5TB drives as they have a better GB/price ratio (some 1TB drives can be found for as low as $75)
 
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