Even it's ability to chirp loudly when a drive fails?
I think you've used some pretty lame raid controllers.
How about it's ability to not waste CPU?
ZFS is good... great even, but (irony intentional) absolute statements are always wrong!
I've used them together. Seems to work just fine.. Just don't let ZFS know that there's more than 1 drive. You can't have them both trying to manage the redundant storage.
ZFS has some great features besides it's redundant storage. You can get them from other filesystems too though I suppose, but I like snapshots built into the filesystem. It *is* overkill to have the filesystem doing checksums and the raid card detecting errors as well, but that's why this is the paranoia setup... Not really looking for the performance king..
ZFS certainly isn't necessary though, if you've got hardware raid.
If you really want hassle free and safe, it would be expensive, but this is what I would do:
ZFS for the main storage - Either using double parity via ZFS or on a raid 6 via hardware raid.
Second location - Same setup, but maybe with a little more space
Use rsync between them using the --backup switch so that any changes get put into a different folder.
What you get:
Pretty disaster tolerant
Easy to maintain/manage
A clear list of any files that may have been changed for *any* reason (Cryptolocker anyone?)
Upgradable - just change drives
Expense - You can build it for about $1800 per machine or $3600 total if you go full-on hardware raid. That would give you about 4TB storage after parity (4 2TB drives - $800, Raid Card - $500, basic server with room in the case - $500)
What you don't get: Lost baby pictures/videos. I've been there, and I'd pay a lot more than this to get them back at this point, and my wife would pay a lot more than I would..
Your current setup is going to be time consuming, and you're going to lose things here and there anyway.. If you just try to do the same thing but make it a little better, you're still going to have the same situation, just not as bad. In this setup you have to have like 5 catastrophic failures to lose anything, sometimes even more..
No no.. thank *you*.... Save the bitcoins for me...
It's a little flaky, but no more than systems you pay a lot of money for..
Of course, it really depends on how well it meets your requirements..
...but if you can get someone who's really good, and can also play nice with others, then I think it's well worth it. That's a pretty rare combo though.. Sometimes just because "others" sometimes won't play nice with people that are better than them because they're threatened..
If you ever have a problem of difficulty 8, and you've got a programmer of skill 7, don't even bother trying.. You're just gonna get a mess..
This has changed (slowly) over time.. You actually *can* dump a million USD in bitcoin without throwing the market all over hell now.. You *should* string it out over a couple of hours (or put up a wall and let the market do it for you) so that you get a reasonable price, but the market will take the direct hit as well at this point..
This very minute, if you were to sell of 10,000 BTC (a bit more than 1 million USD) in with an order that would sell immediately, you would push the price of BTC down by 5 cents. With their price in the $130 dollar range, that's actually not much of a fluctuation.
You haven't looked very hard (or at all) then.. I would think the average slashdot user would be able to find something they'd like to buy on www.bitcoinstore.com. I know it's hard because the name is so misleading, but they sell things that you can purchase with bitcoin. Oh, and the nice part is, they're actually often times cheaper than their USD equivalents because they save so much money by using bitcoin (no charge backs, and *tiny* fees compared to comparable USD systems (visa/paypal/mastercard)).
If the button were there, I'd use it.. Are you listening slashdot?
Mining with GPU's has a very limited lifespan as well now.. ASIC's are here, and taking over, and GPU's can't compete with them even a little.. Right now there may be a window because ASIC supply is limited, but not for long.j In a short time, it won't be worth the electricity. No matter what the price is, it will balance out that way, because ASIC is simply the most efficient way to do it (by far).
I got pizza delivered to the house the other night. It cost me 0.82 bitcoins. Pizza Hut got it there in about 35 minutes.
Of course, Pizza Hut doesn't support using bitcoins directly, but there is a proxy to make it happen... pizzaforcoins.com
Incidentally, the first well documented purchase of anything real using bitcoins was also purchasing pizza (years ago).. The purchaser spent 10,000 BTC to have 2 pizzas delivered. Later after the price of Bitcoin had shot way up, a journalist asked him if he regretted that.. He said something like "no way.. it was *REALLY* good pizza" (that he spent the then equivalent of $300,000 on).
Of course posting the answers to your questions in
Bitcoin's version of confirmation means that the transaction is set in stone. It's virtually impossible to conceive of a way that the transaction could ever be undone under any circumstances.
When you use your debit card at the store, this is not what you're doing or getting.
If you just want to know that someone had funds available, and has sent them to you, then you will find that out in a couple of seconds.. It's still theoretically possible (but pretty darn difficult) they they could also spend those funds elsewhere, and then you don't know if you're really going to get paid in the end or not. Not the kind of effort someone is going to go through to steal a coffee.
If you've purchased/sold a house, or maybe a car, then you probably want to hang out for a couple of confirmations.. I'd still say though that after two confirmations (somewhere from 10-20 minutes usually) you're probably pretty safe, even if you transferred a couple of million dollars.
Zero value for criminal prosecution.. The loss of family photos would end up in civil court I believe, and could possibly bring in millions depending on "harm" determined there..
Family photos that were stolen in a criminal case would probably have the same value any other random photo's fair market value (not much).
...but the money *is* data.. USD or BTC.. the money is just data.
Without life, Biology itself would be impossible.
