Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2009/02/21
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]I recommend against using any RAID for archival storage. The reason for this is that RAID combines several disks into a single logical volume, and the combining is done by proprietary electronics that are not necessarily compatible with other brands of RAID or formats of RAID. If you put images on, say, a RAID 5 array, the individual disks are not readable without special software that you don't have. In order to read data from a RAID 5, you need to have the same RAID controller that wrote the data in the first place. Electronics are ephemeral. If the RAID controller dies and you can't find a replacement, then it doesn't matter how much redundancy you have on the disks themselves. RAID 5 is great for day-to-day storage of things. It's what I use to protect myself against short-term loss of data, and it gives a nice speedup, too. But when I make an archival copy, I just copy files to a single hard drive, connected with one of those Newer Technologies cables that Larry Z mentioned, which I format as NTFS and not as Mac OS (because I figure that 50 years from now there is a higher probability that you'll be able to read Microsoft-format disks than Apple-format disks).