Do you need a lot of disk storage? Try unRAID

I recently just built one of these for storing all my photos and other media. Started with 2 TB of storage and will be able to expand to 22 TB and larger with this system over time.

http://www.lime-technology.com/

conifermtman wrote: I recently just built one of these for storing all my photos and other media. Started with 2 TB of storage and will be able to expand to 22 TB and larger with this system over time.

http://www.lime-technology.com/

Very interesting. Might have to look into that. Photos eat up the most memory on my computer.

conifermtman wrote: I recently just built one of these for storing all my photos and other media. Started with 2 TB of storage and will be able to expand to 22 TB and larger with this system over time.

http://www.lime-technology.com/

How could you possibly use all that space??

Robynabc wrote:

conifermtman wrote: I recently just built one of these for storing all my photos and other media. Started with 2 TB of storage and will be able to expand to 22 TB and larger with this system over time.

http://www.lime-technology.com/

How could you possibly use all that space??

My digital cameras generate files that are between 20 and 30 MB a piece, so I needed a solution that would grow with me. Also photos that are edited in Photoshop can easily grow to 100 to 300 MB a piece.

Can I ask how much something like that would run?

Robynabc wrote: Can I ask how much something like that would run?

Biostar Motherboard with 6 core AMD CPU and 2GB - $150
Coolermaster Case - $60
Corsair 400watt Power Supply - $40
2 -2TB drives - $240 I would buy drives from two different manufactures so you have two different failure rates.
2 GB Lexar USB Flash drive - $15
Total $505

Not as bad as I thought! that is how much an 500G drive was about 4-5 years ago.

Robynabc wrote: Not as bad as I thought! that is how much an 500G drive was about 4-5 years ago.

When you compare it to a Drobo it is inexpensive

A four disk Drobo runs $349 before disks
A five disk Drobo runs $759 before disks
An eight disk Drobo runs $1,495 before disks

My unRaid before disks only cost $265 and will support up to 6 drives before I need to add aditional SATA adapters.

The Drobo will have better write times because it is basically RAID 5. However if you have a three or larger array and two disks go bad you have lost all of your data. In unRAID if two disks go bad you still can read the data on the third disk. If you have a 12 disk RAID 5 system and two disks go bad, you have lost all of your data, in unRAID you would still have 9 to 10 disks you can still read.

Now if you are not technically inclined the Drobo is way better choice, just not as cheap or flexible.

So, what is it expandable to? How many slots?

Robynabc wrote: So, what is it expandable to? How many slots?

The case I used will hold up to 12 drives, so 11 for data and one for parity. There are people that have built 20+ drive unRAID boxes.