Originally posted by texandrews I think you may be enjoying yourself....I'm interested in that UV treatment for fungus. But all of your new stuff is going to be very useful, I think.
FWIW, I just went on my own spending spree for 2018: several lenses for my K1, handy ones, 2 used 1 new. But today I await the big prize: a DA 25 645 from Lens Authority (the seller for Lens Rentals). Very expensive, but the best price I've seen for this now rare lens, save for one other guy who basically got the deal of this new century. Anyway, I'm very close to fully kitted out. Now, attention turns to the computer and storage side of things. Finally must get a RAID, and the computer needs a big upgrade.
Yes, I’m having fun.
I built a tower server to provide a place to make routine backups. I used Unraid, from Lime Technologies, as the OS for the server. The motherboard is from an old Dell computer, and I used an IBM M1013 (or something like that) as a disk controller. It uses an 8-lane PCIe bus to provide 8 parallel SATA controllers. My version of Unraid lets me control six disks, one of which is a parity disk. With 4T drives in all slots, one can have 20T of storage. I don’t have 4T drives in all slots, and my capacity is 13T.
The Unraid OS goes on a thumb drive, and I set the BIOS to boot from the USB first.
I put it all in a tower case.
Unraid is NOT RAID. It does not stripe files across multiple drives, and it does not mirror. It builds a share folder across all drives, but each written file is put on one discrete disk. The parity disk provides the bit total for each bit position for each disk on the array, either even or odd. It can use that to reconstruct any one failed disk in the array. If two disks fail at once, it can’t reconstruct them, but it doesn’t affect what is stored on the other disks, which minimizes the damage. I have already replaced two of the disks in the server with no data loss, and I have used the backup to reconstruct my wife’s computer with no data loss.
The network interface is 1000baseT, and my backups write to the server at 70-100 MB/s.
I doubt I have more than $400 in the server, including Unraid.
I keep my primary photos on my computer hard disk, with no redundancy, and back up to the server every day (full image backups monthly, and incremental backups daily), using Macrium Reflect. I have three months’ worth of backups for both our computers at any one moment.
This was the replacement for two different pre-packaged network attached storage servers, both of which were an order of magnitude slower and each of which only held two disks.
I also fill up a couple of 4T USB drives and put them in the safety deposit box at the back, once in a while, to minimize risk in case of total loss (fire, etc.).
Rick “whose digital photos are mostly vulnerable to software obsolescence” Denney