[Leica] drobo question

[jbm at jbm.org (Jeff Moore)]

2009-08-02-17:08:03 Tina Manley:
> That's one thing that worries me because I had always set my JBOD up 
> year by year and when I've filled one year, I retire those hard 
> drives to use for reference only.  I guess that's not possible with 
> RAID or Drobo?  How do you retire older files?  Is that possible or 
> do you have to fill everything totally up and start over?  I'd rather 
> do it year by year.  My LightRoom catalogues are year by year also.

What's your criterion for retirement of files?  Are these still good
files of pictures you just aren't currently accessing often, or ...?

My (possibly naive, and perhaps incapable of scaling to the volume of
work you do) approach is: I just keep every digital photo I've taken in
the current RAID array.  As generations of disks got larger, I've been
able to migrate an intact array in the ReadyNAS to larger disks and get
more storage (although in the NV I was using RAID 5, so when I did a
migration I ended up with the original-size volume and a new "bonus"
volume with the additional space, which I had to spread things across).

Eventually, quite recently, I migrated all my data from the ReadyNAS NV
to a ReadyNAS Pro (with six 1T drives, yielding
4T-minus-filesystem-overhead of space with 2-drive redundancy).  When I
start hitting the limits of that space in a few years, I expect bigger
drives will be not only available but well-tested, and I can migrate the
whole kit'n'kaboodle to a full set of bigger drives (one drive at a
time, letting the NAS absorb and rebuild onto each new drive before
adding the next).  Since I'm using their proprietary magical RAID this
time, I'll end up with a single larger volume instead of the original
plus a lagniappe.

You might wish to work this way, if there's enough space.

If you wish to work essentially the way you were before, then just:

  * Keep your active working storage in the RAID array;

  * When you "retire" a set of data, copy it to another drive outside
    the array, store that as you would your usual "retired" drives, and
    delete the data you just copied from the RAID volume.