Okay, I’ve been thinking a lot today about how to replace the RAID and this is what I have come up with.
Sell the 5 250GB drives in the RAID box currently. Should be able to get $65 or so for each. $325
Since I already have a hot swap SATA case with 2 bays, buy 2 more trays for it and 2 400GB sata drives for offline storage and quick recovery. $12 for the trays and $418 for the 2 drives.
500 GB drives have a price premium since they are the big daddies at the moment and cost .66 cents a GB at least. 400GB drives are around .52 cents a GB. 320GB drives are at .40 per GB. So I can get 960GB for $384 or 800GB for $418, so $34 saves me swapping drives, but is also more risk of data loss. Decisions, decisions.
Get a whole honkin bunch of DVDs and archive incoming files as soon as they get there. $68 for 200 8x DVD-Rs.
The G5 will become the media server, which is no big deal as it’s on all the time anyway. I like RAID setups, but the one I have now is just too complicated with too many things that can go wrong and eat the whole RAID. Also, RAID is not an excuse for not having offline backups. There are plenty of things that will cause multiple drive failures, and multiple copies of the data is the only thing that will guarantee that you’ll be able to recover from nastiness.