This is a request for comment...
Last Friday, May 20, the disk space that holds home directories (H: drive) for students took a huge jump and filled up. This has happened several times in the past. UCS monitors disk trends and adds space accordingly. When anomalies occur and there are huge jumps, the students are unable to save data to their home directory until UCS either adds disk space or finds inappropriate data that can be removed from the disk storage.
The full disk this last Friday was caused by legitimate use of home directories. There were several media projects that were saved to students H: drive.
A possible solution would be to provide a new drive letter and associated storage that is dedicated to media storage. The physical drives would be cheaper, slower and less reliable (99.9% instead of 99.999%). If performance was an issue, then the data could be temporarily moved to the students H: drive for class presentations.
I will flush out the details of a solution as comments come in.
If possible creating one drive for word based documents and then another for media such as powerpoint. However, I know very little about computers but as a student I know we need reliable drives to save on.
I'm not sure what kinds of comments you are wanting. My students (about 130 of them) do need the ability to save media projects starting at about this time of each term. I don't believe any of them are saving video (we have a different system for that) but they are saving a fair number of images and possibly some sound. Some of this is in preparation for presentations during the week before Dead Week. They also have projects that they are submitting via their public folders -- PowerPoint, databases, and websites -- but none of them are particularly large. We have been using the storage space in approximately the same way for several years.
My main concern is with reliability. We need to be sure that their presentations can be ready to go when needed (since they occur at a special event, not during regular classes). I think we could work with a separate drive, somewhat slower, if necessary. Would they also have their H drives available in order to use their public folders and for their actual presentations?
That seems a sensible use of storage, and reasonable to only move it faster for presentations, but---there would have to be clear directions on how to do so for those computer challanged people to be able to do so. And the directions need to be in place that is sensible and accessable to the afore mentioned people.
When i got here, so many of your subjects were in places i didn't expect them to be. Even now, alot of students don't know that to access wou email from home they have to go to Find it. and then the login's
I think that's a good idea. Another less desireable solution may be to purchase some portable hard drives for media projects that students could check out.
1. How many students do you think might regularly use the new type of media storage?
2. What possible solutions are there other than a new slower drive just for student media storage?
3. What if a lot of the student media stored on a media drive was moved "at once" to the H drive, say for finals week; wouldn't this recreate the problem?
Is the problem always/mostly with student files? Because their files are more temporary (4-5 years max. in most cases) would setting up a separate, more flexible drive specifically for students be an option? It seems rather unfair to relegate their work to a less reliable drive, especially since their work is their reason for being on the drives at WOU in the first place.
If the problem oscillates among faculty, staff, and student files, the media option sounds good IF it can be made reliable and fast. For those few like me who use mostly word processing, our files can be readily transported on other formats, but media files seem to need more stability.
Bill -
I think the blog is a great idea but the question I have is how will others know to go to it unless there is a message sent out to advise them to check it?
Jay
Bill, we always encourage students to save media files locally because they're so large, and because performance tends to be better, but your solution sounds like a good one. But how would you police it? Could the server really tell the difference between types of files?
Would it be better to just have a cap and then inform people they can get approval to go over it? That way, if someone with a media project approaches you, you can create space for them in this "media area."
Bill
Especially since these are legitimate, I think we need to see how we can increase the space. I think the media example is one that will continue to haunt computing services as these tend to use large amounts of space. So anyway we can increase the space for these needs I think we should support.
Gary
I believe, in this case, that the temporary increase in the use of space is due to a class that has final projects going on. This happens, usually once a term and may be handled by a class folder on the k: drive having an increase in size just for this type of data and for this class or classes. I believe Mary Bucy and/or Diane Tartar are two of the teachers with this kind of issue.
Anyone who runs a media rich presentation from a network drive needs to have their head checked...No matter how fast the drive/network is.
I don't think that adding a slower drive would be a problem, as there is already huge lag opening a large file or file copying but this is due to the limitations of the network, so if these new disks were say... 7200rpm versus 10,000rpm or SCSI vs. IDE, no one would notice.
Students need to realize they aren't going to be able to pull up that 330MB Photoshop file in a few seconds or save DVD formatted content for "quick access". (at least until our network gets a very expensive overhaul) I do think however, that more storage is necessary as digital media use grows exponentially and data storage needs increase accordingly. So in short... more storage = :)
Being that the amount of students is increasing it sounds as if increasing the disk space is really the only option. Making a maximum disk space that someone can use and allowing them to ask for more if needed sounds like the best option except for all the students that needed this extra space would ask for more space and we would be in the same situation again. If the amount of students keeps rising and we are already in this situation then we must add more disk space. I am not sure about how it is divided now, but maybe there is a better way to span the disks than to have a seperate one for media, which would need seperate student folders on that drive too.
Thanks for your post Bill. I have added some technical information about our storage systems as an entry to my own blog. Travis's Blog
Bill's comments are quite correct with regard to less reliable. However as I mention in my blog entry, the "less reliable" storage has been running with 0 interuption for more than a year now.
Also with regard to performance there are many variables. Including but not limited to the server attached to the storage, the entire network path from server to desktop, and the desktop machine itself.
bill - as we promote and use digital technology, we will see exponential growth in the need for speed, processing power, and memory/storage. We somehow need to project need, and try to allocate funds to expand capacity. we (students, staff, faculty) ultimately need to be able to use the tools to their fullest extent.
Steve:
Please read my response:
Travis' Response