Disk Space

Groups beginning new funded projects are advised to purchase their own disk space for analysis and storage of data. Disk space on the central network RAIDS is available for $400 per 64GB for 3 years. We have 64GB and 128GB size volumes available. This disk space is high availability (RAID on UPS) and backed up weekly to tape.

Or when you buy your workstation(s) to do your analysis, you can make sure to buy lots of disk space internal to the box to use. This is a lot cheaper (as the bureaucracy has not yet given us a way to fund the IT group through workstation charges yet). The main drawback is lots of disk in your workstation will make your office much hotter and noisier and may trip your power breakers. And we do not provide backup -- though we will setup weekly mirror jobs between your disks.

If you want to buy a system just for storage that no one will use as a terminal, there are some options (for a fee) that Partners Research has to house your system. Contact the IT group for details if you want to go this route.

Limited areas of temporary disk space are available to all for data analysis. Users must remove data from these disks when analyses are complete. These spaces are cleaned weekly and are not backed up by the Martinos Center.

/space/monday
/space/tuesday
/space/wednesday
/space/thursday
/space/friday

Any old data left on the day-of-the-week spaces will be removed early in the morning of the named day (that is, /space/monday is cleaned on Monday morning, etc.)

/space/OTHER

All other /space filesystems are project specific and can be used only with permission of the owner.

/homes/OTHER

Home directories are NOT to be used for image data. They are for code, documents, summarized results, etc.

Home directory disk space on central UNIX/linux based systems is limited to 400 MegaBytes. To determine how much is currently being used, type the following command at a UNIX/linux command line from your home directory

du -sk .??* * | sort -n

The resulting numbers will be in KiloBytes. The sort will order the results so the biggest space hogs are last.

See the Backups page for information on storage volume backups.

See the Understanding Group Permissions in UNIX page for information on general file permissions in UNIX and how to set up group areas for shared write access by the whole group.

See the Security page for information about data file security issues. It is important to note that NO NETWORK DISK SPACE in the Martinos center is safe for HIPAA sensitive files.