Something occurred to me last night, as I moved yet another Aperture project over to my ZFS share: the ability to arbitrarily relocate projects to different storage platforms essentially gives me a manual version of the buzzword from yesteryear, Information Lifecycle Management (ILM). In essence, old data (projects) can be moved to slower disks, where speed isn’t as critical, and active data can be kept on the faster disks. This way, the project you completed last year that you haven’t touched in months won’t be filling up the platters of your high speed drives.

It does suck that the granularity level for Aperture relocation is projects, not at the file level or even the album level. Perhaps Aperture 3.0 (or Aperture X, if the rumors are to be believed) will include that? While we’re dreaming, it would be really nice to be able to tell Aperture that it could use a number of disks or locations, and to move files around based on usage patterns, and implement a real automatic policy. For example, a preference for moving anything not viewed in a month to the slowest storage, anything used in the last month but not in the last 48 hours goes on your regular disks, and files used in the last 48 hours get moved to the SSD or 15K SAS drive you have for Photoshop scratch space. I know most users don’t have 15K drives in their machines, or even performance SSDs yet, but it would be a way for Apple to raise the bar on Lightroom. It would also allow photographers to free up swap space for Photoshop and other image manipulation programs, which would also help the appeal of Aperture to the professional photographer.

Back in the real world, I’m considering what it would take to setup an iSCSI volume on a zpool made of a mirror of fast disks current projects on, and move them to a regular raidz backed CIFS share once they are no longer active. About $200 would get me a fast 320GB pool for active projects, accelerated with an SSD and with mirroring for failure protection. Not a bad deal. Makes me understand the appeal of the Hybrid Storage Pool a little better.