Members Only / A Digital Wet Dream

Okay, so I don't talk about what I do for a living much, mostly because I deem it boring and useless. Sure, in a very indirect way, I am contributing to the welfare of healthcare, and preventing medical errors that may cost lives. But I consider my geeky job as something that is not that passionate and intellectual.

Let me digress a bit. In my humble opinion, knowing everything about "computers" does not exactly constitute higher intelligence. Computers are factual. They are designed by humans with a blue print, and all you have to do is understand the logic and how it works, so forth. But true intelligence is something along the lines of a philosopher, psychiatrists, psychologists, or sociologists. Anything else is not intelligence, mainly because all the areas I just mentioned involve a higher awareness of being, as well as something that can aid society.

Anyway, back to the point. So this is one rare opportunity where I'll get to share with you a little tidbit about what I do. I go to hospitals and help them set up redundancy and fault tolerance on their super computers and large scale enterprise databases. That merely means that should something fail, like a disk gone bad, or a power supply dies, the hospital is not necessarily affected negatively. With high availability solutions, a hospital can continue to function regardless of failure.

So what does that have to do with this blog? Well, I have all this knowledge and experience to help hospitals set up high availability and eliminate points of failure for their most critical systems. Yet, I have endured two hard drive failures since I have moved to Chicago! The first one was a big scare, because I thought I have actually lost ALL of my pictures from 2001 to 2004, and all of my emails from 1998 to 2004. Then I found out that I have a saved image to restore from, thanks to my prep work prior to moving here from Kansas City. Then the next failure was less than a year ago. It was by chance that I had some sort of a backup system going on, so once my hard drive died unexpectedly, I was able to restore nicely.

And that brings us to today. Recently, my hard drive has been acting up, behaving the same way as it had as a harbinger to my prior drive failures. And this time, I have no back up in place. So I panicked. After much thought and deliberation, I decided that it is time for me to purchase a Network Attached Storage system with RAID capability. In other words, this just means that it is an external hard drive system by itself on the network with built-in redundancy and some features of high availability. It was definitely not cheap, as I thought really hard before spending over $800 on this nifty device.

Mind you, this equipment was intended for small businesses. But for some reason, I have amassed so much digital media that I cannot afford to lose. For example, since purchasing my first digital camera at the end of 2001, I have taken 18,376 pictures to date, all worth 30 GB! If you don't know how much that is, think of it this way. When you go out and buy a new computer, more than likely the hard drive that comes with it has a capacity of 40 GB. For an average person, that much capacity can last her/him about three years.

Then there's the music collection that I have purchased over the years. Excluding the music I have yet to sort and categorize, I have 11,966 songs, equivalent to a continuous playback for 35 days, all worth 57 GB. At 99 cents a song, reacquiring that many songs can be expensive! And I have not yet gotten into all the important documents and research paper I have saved over the years.

So today, I finally received my NAS device. The one I purchased has a capacity of a terabyte. Which means... {Drum roll.} I am now officially a member of the tera club! So how much is a TB, or terabyte? That is 1,000 GB. And why is this such a big deal? Well, it was not more than six years ago that Hallmark and Wal-Mart both boasted that they were one of the few companies in the world that has data warehouse with terabytes of data. Back then, a terabyte of storage had cost tens of thousands of dollars. Thanks to the rapid advancement in technology, a terabyte of data can be had for $1,000. And thanks to the internet and online price shopping, I was able to get my hands on this specific NAS device for $800.

So yeah, now you can totally understand why I'm having such a huge, digital wet dream. Of course, I'm going to have to pay out of my nose for this "toy," but it will make me sleep better at night knowing that nothing will be lost if a drive failed. Well, of course, unless there is a fire at my condo, in which case I am screwed. =) But I'm not sure if I can sleep tonight though, because I'm torn in deciding the type of RAID to configure for my NAS. RAID 1 is extremely highly available and redundant, but slow and provides lesser usable space {half of the terabyte capacity}. Then there is RAID 5, which offers the best performance with a nice balance of redundancy and efficiency. At this configuration, my usable space is three quarters of the terabyte. Hmm... Decisions.

Luckily, before heading out to Amber's, I was able to play with it and set it up on my home network. It took a couple hours, but I did it! And now I'm just watching my existing data being copied onto the NAS. How sweet is that?!?

Okay, this concludes my geekiness episode. You will not see this again for a VERY long time, as I return to my normal self. =)