This is a followup to a previous post, in which I laid out the principles of how storage should be managed. This post will be the first of two which goes into detail about hardware, software, and how to set everything up.

If you’re not already familiar with RAID, go read the Wikipedia entry, although this [...]

The post on getting (almost) enterprise-class storage for cheap that I promised a couple of days ago isn’t quite ready yet, so here’s a post on the adoption cycle for digital media creation technologies. It’s good background for much of the discussion on this blog, which is, after all, largely about how commodity technology is [...]

This post is a follow-up to a post from a couple of weeks ago, “How not to store data“, in which I admonished against the all-too-common practice at small production facilities of stashing data on lots of external hard drives with no coherent management plan.

The single most important characteristic of a storage system is reliability. [...]

Having heard several completely mangled attempts to explain the benefits of ZFS (reliably believed to be a feature in the next version of OS X) in various places (including on This Week in Media a few weeks back), I feel I should probably take a crack at explaining what it is and, more to the [...]

We’ve all heard stories about people who have sold their houses or run up $30,000 in credit card debt to make their movies. And people in some quarters have accused a lot of Red fans of this sort of thing… of buying equipment they can’t afford with little idea of how they’ll ever pay it [...]