I’ve run out of space again on the drive for my pictures. Maybe I should use the delete key more often or use less layers in Photoshop files. Or save to TIFF when a print is finished.

I have one drive that is dedicated to pictures and about two years ago I bought a RAID system after almost losing all my pictures one weekend. I went from three copies of everything to one after having two new drives fail in one weekend. It was a scary weekend. The new drives had been purchased on sale for a very low price. It turns out they were refurbished. I returned the drives and upgraded my computer with a RAID system two days later. Things have been good until lately when I started running out of room again.

This weekend I am replacing the four 160MB drives in the RAID with four 500MB drives. This will increase space for pictures from 465GB to 1.4TB. As long as I don’t buy that Canon 50D with the 15MP images the upgraded RAID should last for several years. At least the RAID is cheaper than having film developed so I shouldn’t grumbled about the cost (but I do anyways).

The process for upgrading the RAID is taking much longer than I expected. I thought it would take one day but it will take two days. The first step is backing up all the data on the old setup which took seven hours using an USB drive. You don’t notice the backup time when you are doing automatic backups at night. I disconnected all the old drives but I didn’t remove from the chassis while moving the cables to the new drives. I labeled all the cables and drives with a marker to avoid mix ups. I won’t remove the old drives from the chassis until I know the new drives are working successfully. I have had problems in the past with upgrades and I don’t like to finalize the physical installation until the data is successfully transferred in case I need to roll back to the old drives.

After connecting the new drives I needed to configure the RAID controller to recognize the new drives. This is done at bootup and only takes a few seconds. Then the RAID had to be formatted. This is a very long process. Formatting started at 9:00 am on Saturday and it was only 75% done at bedtime. Fortunately it was complete this morning. Now the data is being restored to the RAID and I expect this will take another seven hours. I’ll have lots of time for other projects today while I am waiting.

Another important tip: Keep the cat out the room with the computer. The case is open and wires are hanging out. Hank, our cat, thought this would make a great play toy. Having cables yanked out during the restore will probably add two days to the process.