Research Data Storage Service provides researchers with on campus access to 3 tiers of secure and resilient storage. Two of the three service options also offer off- site backup.
All storage is accessible from Windows, Linux and MacOS via SMB or NFS although we are unable to offer mixed access.
More information can be found on the IT Service Portal.
Research Data Storage subscription can be purchased or renewed via IT Service Portal.
NFS exports are mounted on /storage/.
SMB shares are accessible using the UNC \\rdg-home.ad.rdg.ac.uk\research.
Basic | Silver* | Gold | |
Snapshots | No | Yes | Yes |
Backups | No | Optional Add-on at £60 per TB per year. | Yes (3 Months) |
Suggested use | General purpose research data which can be easily recreated or downloaded from another source. | Research Data to be used with computing platforms or fast access via desktops. – Part of the Research Cloud. | General purpose research data which is not easy to recreate, where additional recovery options are available. |
Data protection level |
One copy protected with parity drives. | Two copies stored in one location on SSD computing tier with optional offsite cloud backup | Two copies stored in two locations with offsite cloud backup |
Cost per TB – 2020-2021 | £106.09 | £282.22 | £433.63 |
*There is currently a 40TB limit on Silver storage to maintain performance.
Share owners can find out information on the shares that they own on the Subscriptions Portal by logging in with the IT username and password:
https://subscriptions.act.rdg.ac.uk Note: this is only available internally or via virtual hosts from off campus, eg rds.act.reading.ac.uk
or nx.reading.ac.uk:4443/nxwebplayer
In order to ensure fair usage, lapsed storage which is not renewed will be marked as read-only for one month. After one month, the lapsed volume will be deleted along with all remaining data.
The University of Reading Research Data Archive is a multidisciplinary online service for the registration, preservation and publication of research data produced or collected at the University of Reading.
University research staff and research students can register and deposit data in the Archive. Up to 20 gigabytes of data per project can deposited at no charge. Deposits greater than 20 GB may be made subject to a charge.
The Archive will enable you to comply with the University Research Data Management Policy and any relevant funder policy for the long-term preservation/sharing of research data. In particular you can:
The Research Data Archive is managed by Research Services and can be accessed via the RES website.
Note: This service is not offered directly by IT.