What computer are you reading this with?

[pier4r]

(12-20-2017 04:24 PM)rprosperi Wrote:  Thanks. A lot of videos and half for backup answers that for sure. It's amazing how much 'stuff' we can accumulate over time. Having several TB of stuff used to seem ridiculously large, now it feels cramped. How times change as the price of storage continues its decades long free-fall, and more content becomes digital.

Well some years ago my home server had 3 TB of multimedia data (mostly videos), but to be honest parting from those (once seen) was not bad.

Now I save the pictures of my family and those are more precious from a subjective point of view. For the moment I have 170 gb of family multimedia data but they are bound to grow. If I do videos of 2-4 minutes, those are 200 mb minimum. Each picture is around 2 mb.

For such precious things (value is subjective, although could be agreed upon by many people, like the amount of people here caring for calculators) I guess it is inevitable that we need more and more storage.

My first home server was a self assembled double pentium 3 with 6TB of disk space (various 1 or 2TB hd attached via usb). A workhorse, but not failsafe. Now it is 2000+ Km away, idle.

Now I have a qnap TS 431 P (that I keep on the balcony) with raid1 , with two disks of 2 TB each. The disks alone were 140 € and the entire setup was 360€ + time (and still I saved a lot of time compared to an assembled setup). Storage with disks 24/7 and raid is not exactly cheap. At least not for many people. (once should consider also the total cost of ownership, therefore continuous monitoring, electricity, etc)

The next step will be renting 1 TB out of one drive for 7€/month. To have a online backup of the main collection of the family data. The advantage is that it will be easier to share and it will reduce the TCO of having another 2 disks in raid 1.