server disk space

[david12345]

hi what do you suggest as server hard disk space decreases- think its got RAID, use Ranger. Users storing lots of photos and now video too in home folders. Could use external usb hard disk on workstation for especially large amounts of video produced by one user etc but this wouldnt help with all the many users' media files. can you put an external usb hard disk on the server and use it in some way for this, or is another internal disk necesssary for the server. or other solutions?

[beast_gts]

Network Attached Storage (NAS) is a good option if you cannot put more disks into the server.

A couple of people on here have discussed using Buffalo TeraStations.

[srochford]

You can add a USB external drive to a server - I've just done it as a "panic" measure to cope with a server that's suddenly gone very full (server due to be replaced in the summer but needs to keep running just a a few more weeks!)

If you can move stuff onto the drive that's not going to be used all the time and must be quick then USB could be a quick, easy fix. NAS is also a good idea (my first plan was to use the Netgear SC101 because we've got several that came free with switches but I can't get it to work!)

Make sure that it's USB2; USB1 is much too slow.

My problem was caused by MS Server Update Services v3 - it seems to download far more updates than the old version and every time we cleared stuff off the server, more appeared!

Useful command I learned this week:
bitsadmin /list /allusers

- it shows the queue of stuff being downloaded by BITS - in this case, it was the (very!) large queue for update services!

[kingswood]

You can add a USB external drive to a server - I've just done it as a "panic" measure to cope with a server that's suddenly gone very full (server due to be replaced in the summer but needs to keep running just a a few more weeks!)

If you can move stuff onto the drive that's not going to be used all the time and must be quick then USB could be a quick, easy fix. NAS is also a good idea (my first plan was to use the Netgear SC101 because we've got several that came free with switches but I can't get it to work!)

Make sure that it's USB2; USB1 is much too slow.

My problem was caused by MS Server Update Services v3 - it seems to download far more updates than the old version and every time we cleared stuff off the server, more appeared!

Useful command I learned this week:
bitsadmin /list /allusers

- it shows the queue of stuff being downloaded by BITS - in this case, it was the (very!) large queue for update services!

Cool information!

Thanks

[accura2000]

You could add a second raid set to the server, a couple of fast SATA2 drives runnign as a mirror should do, migrate you user folders to them and get ranger to remap to that drive instead, this would free up disk access from your main system drive, also it would give you let load onto the USB ports as i find most USB ports flakey under pressure unless you want to opt of Firewire external drives.

Personnally i would use the second raid option.

[david12345]

how much disc space do you let users have? of course this might differ a lot between users- eg teachers vs assistants vs students;power users might want lots of photos or even video.. sometimes however people are putting a lot of high res pics on network that aren't going to be printed out and so don't need to be so so hi res in the first place. do you use any rule of thumb guidelines as to what's a reasonable amount for different users?

[User3204]

I start all new students off with 150mb, and a lot of them don't use it up.

When the users start to fill up their quota I will look at their user folder, and if it looks like mostly work related, I will up it by about 100mb... I keep doing this every so often.

There are very few people ove 450mb.
There are NO students with over 1gb, although there are few staff that have 2gb/5gb and are using large proportion of it - it's mostly the art teachers.

The disk partition is 650gb, but I'm only using about 200gb of it, all in user data, for 1500 students (and 100 teachers).

On the staff network, we have a 60gb disk, which is running at about 57gb. I am attempting to convince Management that we need a SAN for these servers, starting at about 1tb.

[nicholab]

External das can be used some thing like the HP MSA20 you then plug this into your external SCSI connection.

[david12345]

I start all new students off with 150mb, and a lot of them don't use it up.

When the users start to fill up their quota I will look at their user folder, and if it looks like mostly work related, I will up it by about 100mb... I keep doing this every so often.

There are very few people ove 450mb.
There are NO students with over 1gb, although there are few staff that have 2gb/5gb and are using large proportion of it - it's mostly the art teachers.

The disk partition is 650gb, but I'm only using about 200gb of it, all in user data, for 1500 students (and 100 teachers).

On the staff network, we have a 60gb disk, which is running at about 57gb. I am attempting to convince Management that we need a SAN for these servers, starting at about 1tb.

is that 150mb per student per year? if so that adds to 225 gb per year?, so what do you do the next year- keep it all and add to it?

has anyone got a policy on what staff should keep so you can delete the rest at the end of year- at least on shared drives?

what about a policy on storing video on shared drives/or in home folders?

or do you set a disk quota program on staff?