Here we are with the next part of our RAID series. This time the article will concern RAID 5, RAID 6 and two alternatives – RAID 5E and 5EE. Take a look… RAID 5 RAID 5 is one of the most popular implementations. It works almost the same as RAID 4 but with one difference. The parity bits are not recorded on a specifically prepared disk – they are dispersed throughout the matrix structure. What [...]

Do you love your data as much as your MacBook®? Well, this is the article (and software) for you. Apple Time Machine® is backup software developed by Apple® Inc. and was first implemented on Mac OS® 10.5 (Leopard®). It cares about your data – your funny photos, important documents or MP3s – no matter what. It helps to store them in a safe way, so even if your expensive, unique and perfect MacBook® Pro will [...]

We are sure some of you have thought about DRBD – about its use and operation. Here is some information about it – a few benefits, some drawbacks, tips and solutions. The built-in volume replication mechanism is based on the open source DRBD which was being developed by the Austrian company LINBIT. It is a popular and widely used software for High Availability (HA) Clusters. Volume replication is used to create a mirror copy of [...]

Here are three invented stories, three good endings and three bad ones. It does not matter who you are and what you do – it can happen to you. Let’s say this article can be an anecdote for you – so you can sleep peacefully at night. John Smith, freelance graphic designer John Smith has been a freelance graphic designer for the past seven years. He uses a 1TB HDD to store his work. The [...]

Life is full of imperfections – we all know it. Sometimes bad things happen to people for no particular reason. As they say: “it happens”. All we can do is to find a way to make some unavoidable situations… avoidable. Every kind of hardware has its restrictions, week points, resistance etc. Whatever we do, we cannot be sure that our data is absolutely safe. Even James Bond-like data HQ cannot give us such assurance. So, [...]

Recently saw the following problem from a customer: They are using Acronis Backup to store their backup on a server powered by DSS V6. From time to time the backup run failed due to an unknown network problem. Luckily the first question we asked them when they called us was about the RAID controller cache settings. Bingo! They told us the RAID controller cache was OFF and the cache mode was set to “write through” [...]

This short story is about how important backing up your data is and how sometimes incidents that people have with regards to data loss or having a second copy of the data are affected. There was a TV show that I saw about a very outraged girl where someone had stolen her photo, which happen to be a very privet photo of her that she was ashamed about, none the less it was stolen and [...]

Most present tape drives include a function called hardware compression. This makes available data compression to the magnetic tape by a drive. In many cases this feature may prove very useful. The hardware compression is much faster than a software compression because as opposed to the software compression it does not use a computer processor which draws from resources. Also it is transparent to the operating system and data is compressed “on the fly”. Usually [...]