On Thu, 2008-10-02 at 10:52 -0700, Keith Lofstrom wrote: > On Thu, Oct 02, 2008 at 09:57:08AM -0700, Loren M. Lang wrote: > ... > > I only have the drives mounted during the 30-45 minutes they are running, > > but this hasn't helped. I am curious on what ideas you might have for > > external hard drives that only need to run for a short time at night. > > Either a cooler enclosure or alternatives like Firewire or E-SATA if > > they can power down drives. > > A crude but usable solution: You can buy plug timers at most hardware > stores ( Ikea Tända for example ) and only provide power for the > enclosures during the backup hours. If the drives are unmounted before > they are powered down ( perhaps a forced kill on dirvish and unmount > from cron at 4x normal finish time ) then they should do fine. > > For extra lifetime, put a small line-powered fan on the same circuit, > and keep the external drive cases as cool as possible. If the outside > of the cases get warm, then some components inside must be getting hot. > Rsync really thrashes drives, creating heat. I keep my backup drives > in fan-cooled trays for that reason. > > A better solution: Your father's company, Alzatex, makes devices with > USB-controlled power switches, right? How about a USB controlled > switch and fan and enclosure product for external USB (or E-SATA) > drives? For extra points, add some crypto security key stuff to to > the product, so the bad guys can't turn on the drive without the > crypto key. I bet Alzatex could sell a few of those, and perhaps > other folks on the list would like some (let Loren know!).
Actually, we have remote-switchable outlets that can be controlled with a RS-232 serial port. Our only production USB products use USB mass storage and USB HID. We have experimented with USB serial internally, but have not had any customers interested yet. I use USB to RS-232 serial converters with Linux and FreeBSD for development and can recommend a few products if anyone is interested. As far as crypto goes, I have considered using dm-crypt or lukfs to provide an encrypted filesystem with the password only stored on the backup server itself and on a USB key in my fire-proof safe. The backup server has no confidential information on it outside of the crypto key to access the external hard drives and the ssh keys to log in to the various other servers as root. > > My own long term plan is to go to E-SATA. I assume the drives can be > powered down like other ATA drives, and they are faster and better > supported than USB. I would like a switch-box for those also, for > the extra security involved. > > Keith > -- Loren M. Lang [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.alzatex.com/ Public Key: ftp://ftp.tallye.com/pub/lorenl_pubkey.asc Fingerprint: 10A0 7AE2 DAF5 4780 888A 3FA4 DCEE BB39 7654 DE5B
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