Well, the title says it all. How much for the 4U disk array unit with 12 drives? I could probably donate $200-300 depending on the price of the disk, or maybe we can all help to donate for one.

http://rackmountmart.stores.yahoo.net/2udiskarray.html

I'd guess about $1,800 for a brand new one

A true entry domain SAS rack is about 1800$ WITHOUT the disk.


What I've been looking for was to put three of those (125$ each)

inside one of these (125$ too)


That's room for 15 discs. That's "only" about 550$, less than a 4U, but still somewhat some money. And that exclude the disks (I already have 7 x 500GB hard drive though).

But for what purpose really? With that misfortune, I've been reevaluating if I should keep archiving the video I'm working from.

I mean, every series that have TF or creature potential I'm making clip from, I have digitized and saved the episodes.
Before, I was burning them on DVD, but after gathering more than 200 DVD of material, it was starting to take room, DVD are unreliable in term of long term storage and are troublesome to get the data back. Especially when you have to go through 200 DVD to find the one that had the right episodes. I have them indexed, but it still a burden to work with.

So I moved to disk storage, but you better have a good setup if you don't want to face disaster like this.

But for what end?
Keeping video that I probably won't watch again?
For others? People aren't interested in trading episodes nor do I have the bandwidth (100GB cap) to broadcast what I have left and right. Especially with what it cost to maintain.

From now on, I'm more likely only going to capture the episode that had the TF, and ditch the rest.

Less trouble, less storage needed, less worries.

Oh and so far, look like 2 or 3 of the 5 disks have a bad head.

And while I was able to recover some data yesterday, one of the disk went bad, cause the whole restoration process to go bad and it deleted 3/4 of the backup!!!
So now, I'm not facing a lost of the last 2 months, I'm facing a total lose of the past years of capture.

years ago i'd acquired 20 or so cheap carbon pencils.had lots of paper and
ink so

well back in the end of 2005/beginning 2006 i'd been operating under the notion
that there was such as thing as a
'internet amateur tf clip' making community out there,ready to be served.the original dragoncrypt
was a cel archive using a complex indexing system so one series of cels could be attached to others,and i've added the video editor and
sound tracks in the 2 websites.it was essentially a mechano set so amateurs could make all the
little clips they wanted,modify the ones i'd stored in the cel archive and let the thing
develop.of course that baby was stillborn.

then after i'd seen a episode of sorcerous stabber orphen i got enthralled with its artistry
(which used a sophisticated 'poof' tf)
and spent another quarter year or so scanning and uploading about a
gigabytes worth of cels using a storyboard camera pov indexing system
featuring sea serpente iron boats thundering therough the waves and lots of non tf scene animations

still a dud as far as attracting the attention of any amateur tf videomakers

the killer came about a year later when i discovered videos i had slammed out in a hour with suggestive
fetish titles were attracting more viewers than the considerably technically and artistically
superior frostfang video.

that was pretty well the end of any hopes i'd had for the existence of a amateur tf clip community

In the end, it turned out that the power supply was the one that got hit by the brown out.
After replacing, all the 5 drives started to respond and I was able to recover everything before performing a surface test.
2 drives had a SINGLE bad sector while the 3rd one had 12, from the PS breaking down. I was able to fix them and I've restored the system.

I did get one of those enclosure to put in the box though.


(yeah, I pulled the front USB and audio jack slab. Their wires were in the way.)

In the long run, I'm still planning to get that Nine Hundred case so that I can easily access all drive, but it will have to wait a bit.
But at least, I managed to get back on track without losing anything, just time and some stress.