AV Rant #243: Stuck on Stuff

[admin]

Part two of Liz's Soup to Nuts on streaming this week is about storage. More than you ever wanted to know about servers, clouds, and NAS (links at AV Rant). Tom has a few things to say about the entire "modular design" idea. Velodyne starts selling subs - directly. AppleTV allows ownership (again). Logitech throws a Hail Mary for the Revue. AT&T drops ESPN3D. Receives nearly 15 complaints.

Discuss "AV Rant #243: Stuck on Stuff" here. Read the article.

 

[jtokach]

On Data Storage...

Hi guys.

Just some notes on RAID. RAID5 only requires three disks, not five. In a standard RAID5 config, parity information is stored across all drives in a way in which allows for the rebuilding of data in the event a single disk goes bad.

I think it would be better advice, unless you're very familiar with RAID arrays, to use RAID0 so as to gain maximum capacity and forego the fault tolerance benefits but instead, backing up files to DVD5/9 or Blu-Ray.

I don't think many people could tackle the task of rebuilding a failed array, and again, in most RAID configs, more than one disk failed = complete data loss.

A better approach would be use RAID0 or something like disk volume spanning or mount points already built into your OS and backup to some sort of offline media. For home use, simplicity is almost always the best answer.

Jim