Where are your photos?

As soon as you finished with one shooting session, you download your images to your computer and eventually burn the good photos onto WORM media, e.g. CD-ROM or DVD disks. If your computer disk drive crashes and this happens once every 5 years or so, you rebuild your image collection from your WORM library. What happens to all those wonderful pictures you recently downloaded from your camera though?

I have had too many disk drives failing on me in the past ten years that it is no longer funny. I hate to lose data. I would hate to lose those family photos you took on your vacation to the Bahamas. I would hate to have to restore 30GB worth of photos from CDs. I would also hate to see a CD go bad because of a scratch or over-exposure to the sun. Plastic material can get brittle over time.

Nothing lasts forever but I would still do backups onto CDR media. However, is there something you can do about your disk drive? Of course you can. Build some redundancy. You can build a secondary disk drive and periodically dump everything in the first drive to the second drive. You can still run into the issue of losing some data in between those dumps however, unless you always keep a copy of your photos on your camera until a dump has occurred. A little inconvenient -- I just want to remove all my photos from the camera and start shooting right away the next day.

My solution is to build a RAID storage system. You can buy one off the shelf these days but I am still a computer geek inside so I built a RAID5 storage with 4 x 300GB SATA300 drives. Last January, I assembled the unit from spare computer parts. I decided that I did not want to use a hardware RAID card because my speed requirements are not significant and the ease of hot swappable bays is not too important to me. I would also be locked in to the proprietary data storage format of the RAID controller manufacturer. I am open source and open community, so software RAID it was.

To add support for my 4 SATA drives, I ordered a new Promise SATA300-TX4 controller card. I do not recall how much it costed but it was a lot cheaper than any RAID controller card.

To get the storage going, I found an old 8GB IDE drive and installed Slackware 11 on it. It has full support for the SATA drives and built a RAID5 configuration from the 4 drives without a hitch. I had nearly 1TB of storage for just about $700.

This week, I realized I forgot something. The old 8GB IDE drive was not meant to stay in the system. Why build a RAID storage that is hosted by a drive that will soon die? The original idea was to run the host operating system on the 8GB IDE drive as a test then transfer the image onto a Compact Flash drive. Well, it is not all that easy and I got lazy so I never moved the image.

I could not afford to wait for that eventuality though. The 8GB drive will die and with the luck that I have it may die tomorrow. So, it has to go. Now, I could really try to fit the image onto a Compact Flash drive but in the end, I decided that I no longer want to deal with command line management for this mass storage. I decided to go all GUI, and I have to do this before my collection of photos grows too big because the storage format is likely going to change -- I already had something in mind for the move.

Last night, I downloaded FreeNAS (freenas.org) and burned the image onto a Compact Flash drive. It is based on FreeBSD and is only 30MB or so big. I have a new RAID5 volume now and am am waiting for it to finish building itself before dumping over 30GB of photos back on it.