While photographers aren’t producing as much digital assets as video people, a couple of thousands of raw files and a good load of PSDs can build up quite a storage need over the years.

While I was looking for a storage solution, I had four priorities:

• Expandability: I had to copy all my stuff once to get them onto a bigger drive – I never want to repeat that experience.
• Encryption: A good deal of my photos is not meant for everyone’s eyes – I think it’s my responsibility to protect the privacy of my models from anyone who might eventually get their hands on one of the drives.
• Cost: Storage systems can cost nearly unlimited amounts of money – money that I’d rather invest in a new lens.
• Fault tolerance: Obviously.

After some testing I came up this totally insane solution:

Take my existing two 500GB WD USB drives and put two shiny (actually, they’re black.) new 1TB WD USB drives next to them. Next, using Linux software RAID 1, I mirror the identical disks, so I get a redundant 500GB and 1TB volume. These volumes are now being encrypted with three different cipher algorithms (yay for paranoia) using TrueCrypt. The final layer is an LVM volume group using the TrueCrypt volumes as PVs.

Here’s some ASCII art:

  +-----------------------+
  |          LVM          |
  +-----------------------+
       |             |
   TrueCrypt     TrueCrypt
       |             |
     RAID1         RAID1
    |     |       |     |
  +---+ +---+   +---+ +---+
  | 5 | | 5 |   | 1 | | 1 |
  | 0 | | 0 |   | T | | T |
  | 0 | | 0 |   | B | | B |
  | G | | G |   +---+ +---+
  | B | | B |
  +---+ +---+

This setup covers all of my four priorities (the only limitation is that you have to expand it in steps of two identical disks). Naturally, this monster isn’t that fast. According to bonnie++, I get about 10MB/s for writing and about 18MB/s for reading. Enough for me.

If you know a better way to get 1.5 TB expandable, encrypted and fault tolerant storage for less than 250 EUR, feel free to email me.