Storage Math: RAID Capacity, Backup Windows & Retention Costs
RAID usable capacity and TB vs TiB, AFR and rebuild risk, backup windows, incremental vs differential volumes, GFS retention, dedupe and compression, cloud vs tape cost per TB-month and an RPO/RTO check with a chart: 8 labs on one post-production studio.
The first lesson is free — no account needed.
About this course
A storage math course that sizes the disks and backups of one fictional video post-production studio in a spreadsheet, for system administrators, IT students and anyone buying a NAS or backup system. You compare raw and usable capacity per RAID level from a lookup table and the TiB the operating system will show, turn MTBF into an annual failure rate and estimate the rebuild time and the risk of a read error during a single-parity rebuild, check whether full backups fit the night window at the speed of the slowest link, compare a week of full, incremental and differential backups, size grandfather-father-son retention, turn logical into physical TB with deduplication and compression, compare five years of cloud archive and tape per TB-month and test the setup against the RPO and RTO targets with a chart. The first lab is free.
Lessons
- RAID Levels: Raw vs Usable Capacity (and TB vs TiB)Free
- Drive Failures & Rebuild Time: AFR, MTBF and Read-Error Risk Pro
- Backup Window: Data ÷ Throughput and the Bottleneck Pro
- Full, Incremental & Differential Backups over a Week Pro
- Retention Policy: Grandfather-Father-Son Copies & Storage Needed Pro
- Deduplication & Compression: Logical vs Physical TB Pro
- Cloud Archive vs Tape: Total Cost & Cost per TB-Month Pro
- RPO & RTO Feasibility Check (with a Chart) Pro