On Jun 16, 2008, at 7:34 PM, Chuck Swiger wrote:
On Jun 16, 2008, at 3:59 PM, Christopher Sean Hilton wrote:
External drives make nice, fast external hot-standby backups. They
are lousy for making long-term backups that you can take offsite,
though. I can and have restored decade old 20/40GB and 40/80GB
DLTtape IV cartridges, and have happily moved to a 220GB sDLT drive.
I've got a few 10-year-old SCSI drives that still work, but I've yet
to find a commodity PATA IDE or SATA IDE brand of drives which make
it much over 5 years, and a large percentage have issues trying to
get much past 3 years of heavy usage.
I've had pretty much the same result. SCSI Drives seem to have a solid
lifetime of about 3+ years with some of them lasting better than 6.
I'm not trying to keep my backups that long though. This is basically
insurance against a catastrophic machine failure more than anything
else. The machine in question has a Mylex Acceleraid 250 and RAID 5
SCSI array with a hot spare. The function of this backup is to protect
my time if the RAID array fails for some reason that I cannot diagnose
quickly. To some extent I also need the ability to go back in time if
delete a file by accident but that's happened once in the past 5 years.
While I really liked the AHA 1540/2940 controllers, I'm dubious
about Adaptec's USB controllers. I've got a few external drives
with both USB2 and Firewire 400 interfaces, and they are faster and
more reliable going over Firewire. YMMV...
I've had the Adaptec Firewire controller and have the same problem as
I do with the USB one. I have a hand full of USB drives in external
enclosures that I used for different things. Mostly to transfer video
from one place to another. Right now I'm using one of them and getting
rid of some ancient video that I no longer need. My USB drive has a
UFS2 filesystem on it and it's mounted with Softupdates turned on.
When I remove a large file or a large directory. Everything works
great for a minute and then file access to the drive just stalls. A
good minute later everything is fine. The interface is either USB or
Firewire because the enclosure can do either.
-- Chris
Chris Hilton tildeChris -- http://myblog.vindaloo.com
email -- chris/at/vindaloo/
dot/com
.~
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~.--.~~.--.~~.--.~~.--.~~.--.~~.--.~~.--.~~.--.~~.--.~~.--.~~.--.~~.
"I'm on the outside looking inside, What do
I see?
Much confusion, disillution, all
around me."
-- Ian McDonald / Peter
Sinfield
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