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Can you have too much storage?

I have 21 TB with 4 more 4tb HDs on the way (will be raid 5 so 12 TB) plus an additional 3 2tb HDs on order (one spare for raid 1 so 2tb). The total is 21 + 12 + 2 = 35TB in two raid 5 and raid various raid 1 arrays. Realistically I only have about 12 of really valuable data, the rest are just junk and various disk image backups, test virtual machines that I never get around deleting.
 
It really depends who you ask. We have 8TB of space at home which is backed up offsite. We currently use about 2.3TB. Most of it is pictures and family videos.

If I started to pass 10TB I would look at cleaning up some space. I'm a big fan of offsite storage and currently do it with an External disk (4TB). If I have to backup 10TB offsite then I would need 2.5x 4TB External disks which increases management.

I'm just not a fan of having outrageous amounts of onsite TB's which don't live somewhere else. If the house burns down you loose the lot.
 
smakme7757 said:
It really depends who you ask. We have 8TB of space at home which is backed up offsite. We currently use about 2.3TB. Most of it is pictures and family videos.

If I started to pass 10TB I would look at cleaning up some space. I'm a big fan of offsite storage and currently do it with an External disk (4TB). If I have to backup 10TB offsite then I would need 2.5x 4TB External disks which increases management.

I'm just not a fan of having outrageous amounts of onsite TB's which don't live somewhere else. If the house burns down you loose the lot.
Click to expand...

What is an External disk? Do you mean like a USB or Esata drive or is External some sort of network cloud based storage setup I'm not aware of?
 
Can you have too much storage?
Click to expand...

No. Storage is what it is...

Aside from my HTPC, I really only have about 1TB of data... but I have about 8TB of storage to hold it/mirror it/back it up... and I'm only going bigger as I replace my smaller drives.
 
corkyg said:
Good point. Maybe a better question is, when does storage become wasteful?
Click to expand...

While grossly simplified, more storage equals more potential copies of a data set, increasing reliability and availability.

Consider f.x. if you have 2TB of data you need an additional 2TB for backup. Ideally you want an off-site backup of the backup for important data, which means 2 more TB.

More storage is never "wasteful" in my opinion. Its just a question of how its utilized... 🙂
 
Think you can not speak of to much storage , but it get complicated by increasing in size to manage with backup in mind . Good example of bad data management are the NASA missing tapes .I am a huge fan of NASA and the Apollo projects , so it is a pity the data is losed .

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11_missing_tapes

The missing tapes were among over 700 boxes of magnetic data tapes recorded throughout the Apollo program which have not been foundD:
 
corkyg said:
Good point. Maybe a better question is, when does storage become wasteful?
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Wherever your personal risk threshold is.

Annual likelihood of a given HDD failing: ~5%
Fatality rate of underwater welders over their working lifetime: ~5%
Annual likelihood of a given home having a fire: ~1.2%
Case fatality rate of H1N1 flu: ~1%
Annual likelihood of any two HDDs failing: ~.25%
Annual likelihood of any three HDDs failing: ~0.0001%
Annual likelihood of being struck by lightning: ~0.0001%

So, if I have my data on one HDD, it's as dangerous as a dangerous, scary job.
If I have it on two HDDs, it's safer than getting the "dangerous" flue strain. But if I only have one backup, it should be offsite because housefires happen.
If I have two backup copies in addition to the original, the odds of data loss are similar to the odds that I'll be struck by lightning. (That happens ~300 times a year, by the way.)
Two local backup copies and a (third) Crashplan backup means you're basically ragnarok-proof. The apocalypse can sometimes happen.

Going from "lightning strike" to "ragnarok-proof" doesn't really merit a ~30% increase in cost of storage, IMO. If I were a bank, I might disagree with myself.
 
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When you have to park your car outside of your garage in order to make room for hard drives, that might be a sign that you have too much storage.
 
I've come to realize that you can either:

1. Keep spending money, expanding storage, spending money ... forever ... trying to store all the crap that you really don't need.

or

2. End the cycle, figure out what you really do need. Keep things manageable.


I'm not going to tell anyone else that they absolutely don't need 175TB of gay S&M porn. Or that they don't need 2800 Blu-ray rips of movies that they'll never watch more than once in their lifetime ... but at some point it's a pretty idiotic waste of money, time, space, and electricity.
 
I don't have much storage by today's standards but I tend to only expand as I need to. I have about 19TB or so. All my stuff including VMs is on that server.

Code: 
[root@isengard ~]# df -hl
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
(removed all the crap that's not relevant)
/dev/md0              5.4T  4.2T  995G  81% /volumes/raid1
/dev/md1              6.3T  4.2T  1.9T  70% /volumes/raid2
/dev/md3              7.2T  919G  6.0T  14% /volumes/raid3
[root@isengard ~]#

I say you can never have too much, as long as you have the proper disaster recovery plan for the actual data in that space. Raid + backups or go home.
 
24TB HDD + 600GB of SSD raw, 12TB usable. 10TB so far in offsite backups. I'm only using about 6TB on-site. I just buy what is useful.
 
I have 32 drives in a SAS DAS setup, but some of those I have been buying for a long time.

I also have about 20 sub 1TB drives kicking around unused as well.

Personally, too much is when you can not get up again once they fall on you without calling someone to come help. Then it is too much 😉
 
Depends a lot on whether you're a home user, or using your home system for some kind of business activity. I have my critical personal data and installed applications backed up twice, and again in the cloud in case of something like a fire. Everything else is my music and movie collections, all backed up but not disaster-proofed. 24TB including some room to grow.

Every time I see a large drive at a really good sale price, I'm tempted, but I really think I have enough for now.
 
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