Replacing tape changer with USB disk drives.

[Christopher Sean Hilton]

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 see?
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around me."
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