Just a thought. My amanda server has seven hard drives dedicated to saving amanda data. Only 2 are typically used (holding and one vtape drive) during an amdump run. Even then, the usage is only for about 3 hours.
So there is a lot of electricity and disk drive wear for inactive drives. Can todays drives be unmounted and powered down then when needed, powered up and mounted again? I'm not talking about system hibernation, the system and its other drives still need to be active. Back when 300GB was a big drive I had 2 of them in external USB housings. They shut themselves down on inactivity. When later accessed, there would be about 5-10 seconds delay while the drive spun up and things proceeded normally. That would be a fine arrangement now if it could be mimiced. Jon -- Jon H. LaBadie j...@jgcomp.com 11226 South Shore Rd. (703) 787-0688 (H) Reston, VA 20190 (703) 935-6720 (C)