1. Suppose you use about 500 GB (0.5 TB) of storage in your personal system, filling about two-thirds of its 750GB disk. Most of that storage is used by your video library. Photos, music and software (including your operating software use about 20GB. Traditional data files, such as word processing files, spreadsheets and email require less than 1 GB. Which of the technologies and strategies discussed in this case might be of practical value to you? Why?
2. Both SAN and NAS systems can use RAID internally (see discussion earlier in chapter). Why might this be a good idea?
Critical Thinking Questions
1. Consider the Library of Congress's 15,000 to 18,000 disk drives. The mean time between failures (MTBF) of a typical disk drive has been estimates at about 50 years. If that figure is correct, the library will have about 300 to 360 drive failures every year, an average of about one a day. What does that mean for managing its hardware? How is that different from the way a small business with five or six disks drives should manage its hardware?
2. Both Madza and the Library of Congress divide their data into multiple tiers to manage it effectively and cost effectively. SAN systems can support this strategy by incorporating several types of storage into one SAN. How would your college or university take advantage of this concept? Outline three tiers of data it could have with two specific examples of data that would be in each tier. (For example, records of students who graduated or left at ten years ago could be in the lowest tier.)