[Year 12 IPM] school HDD capacity

[Donna Benjamin]

Encouraging staff and students to minimise their diskspace usage, and
educating them about using appropriate levels of compression for their
files depending on application and intended outcome are Good Things(tm)
to know and practice. All good food for thought for information
processing and management. ;)

However with the increasing importance of digital literacies, and ICT
for creating and thinking, storage is going to be more and more of an
issue. Gmail gives people 2GB to store email, and from an industry
perspective, I think that seems like a fair limit.

Drive space is cheap these days - the 'sweet spot' seems to be around
$0.55 per GB on 320 Gb serial ATA drives. Perhaps a diskspace upgrade
could be paid for by asking staff and students to pay $2 each to get
more network storage? 1Gb for students and 2Gb for staff?

I just took a look at some component pricing... you should be able to
build a no-name file server with 1.5 terabytes (1500 Gb) with hardware
Raid 5 for less than $5000.00 and of course linux is free. If you're not
sure about linux - ask Google what they're using to cache the web for
indexing.  ;)

Apple terabyte x-serve raid is $10k. Not sure about others like HP,
Dell, Acer, IBM etc...

Or take a look at Network attached file storage options and just adding
a GB somewhere to your existing network. An old Harris Technology
brochure I have here suggests such devices can be had for $1209.

Just a different angle to think about :) Remember, we once tried to
minimise memory usage by storing the year as 2 digits instead of 4 - and
look where that got us? ;)

- Donna


> Sorry about the cross posts. I know this has been a recent thread, but
> as I'm not the network administrator I sort of ignored it all. The
> reason I'm raising it now is that its just become an issue at our
> school. Our school’s hard disk capacity for over 1300 staff and
> students is 200 GByte. Students have been allocated 10 Mg, and staff
> 100 Mg. Previous to this, staff had virtually unlimited space and
> students had the space to store lots of personal music as well as
> games. Needless to say, the school’s hard disk was full and our
> network hardly worked at all. This student practice has recently been
> stopped.
>
> My questions are these:
> 
>      1. How much home drive space do other schools allow for students
>         and staff?
>      2. What is your school’s total hard disk capacity? 
>      3. Are teachers in your school encouraged to backup their school
>         files on the school network, or are they asked to use their
>         own personal equipment? 
> 
>  
> 
> 200 GByte seems pretty small for over 1300 people, especially when we
> are trying to encourage the use of new technologies and teach in an
> “ICT rich” environment. And for the same reason, the maximum disk
> space allowed seems far too small as well. My students continually
> have to delete things in order for them to be able to save their work;
> teachers the same. A lot of people are unhappy.
> 
>  
> 
> I'd appreciate some feedback for our network administrator. Perhaps
> this sort of information has been archived somewhere already.
> 
>  
> 
> Thanks very much,
> 
> Jim

> Jim Bunn
> CCNA CCAI ITE1
> Technology Coordinator
> Hampton Park Secondary College
> Victoria  Australia
> 
> 8795 9400
> 
> bunn.jim.c at edumail.vic.gov.au 

-- 
donna benjamin - executive director
http://www.creativecontingencies.com/
ph +61 3 9326 9985 | mob +61 418 310 414
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