Knock-on effect

[Technical alert - bypass this post if not interested in computer topics ] 

I use my computers for a variety of tasks like music, video, photography, authoring, plus the regular tasks that people get up to like email and browsing. No wonder I've accumulated some data over the years.

So I knew that the replacement of a large amount of my disk storage required a more detailed rethink of the rashbre LAN. Old mainframe systems used to have so-called batch runs which could take hours or sometimes days to run. I'm hoping to stay away from this for rashbre central.

The existing Drobo disk storage units have a one Gigabit ethernet connection, but the new Synology has 4 Gigabits. which can be bound together. That's an obvious thing to do, except I need (a) fast Category 8 LAN cabling (b) enough slots on my switch to be able to plug them all in. Yep, done - and with fancy coloured cabling too so I know which are the really fast links.

Then I have to think about the size of disks to be used. The Drobo units are set up with 5 times 6 Terabyte disks. I used to use a certain financial sum as the sweet spot for disks, but I now realise that 6 Tb is about the maximum I want to be copying around, at least until the rest of the infrastructure catches up.

It also means I can dip into my spare disk drives to start the population of the Synology unit.

Then I'll be interested in adding in a couple of RAID1 M.2 cache, which could speed the whole disk access to the device. They are like 2 mini-disks dedicated to caching the access to the device and using two means they are read-write RAID1 compliant 'fail-safe'.

Then, for the main disk units, I'm using the Synology SHR hybrid variety of RAID which allows a Drobo-like mix-and-match of drive sizes with less waste than a vanilla RAID configuration.

I've also got to think about 3-2-1 backup. That's the approach which says have 3 copies of data (the working data and 2 backup copies) on two different media (disk and tape) with one copy off-site for disaster recovery. Except tape is a bit old-fashioned and I'll have two variants on different disk formats.

That's where a Drobo can still be useful: to run the second backup, suitably off-site.

...And I realise that this is the type of post for which 'blogs' were originally invented!