Berkeley CSUA MOTD:Entry 37561
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2025/07/08 [General] UID:1000 Activity:popular
7/8     

2005/5/6-9 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:37561 Activity:nil
5/6     What do you people think of sticking four 250GB IDE Hitachi drives
        in a single PC and calling that the backup server for 8 people (each
        person gets 125GB for 2 sets of notebook images and other assorted
        files).
        I do know that SCSI is built for this and IDE is a hack-job /
        consumer-grade.
        I know you lose throughput by sticking two drives on the same IDE cable
        because of the master/slave issue, especially if they are both being
        accessed at the same time.
        I am assuming if an individual drive gets toasted we just replace the
        drive and tell everyone to re-backup (I've heard too many stories of
        both drives in a RAID getting toasted anyway).  I am assuming if the
        computer fries then we just get a new computer and stick in all the
        drives.
        My original plan was to give a 160GB external drive to every employee
        with a notebook, but the boss is inquiring about the server option
        because he wants anyone who steals information from the company to
        commit more obviously illegal acts, and to avoid the "My external
        drive was stolen!  What's an encryption option?" problems.
        Yes, I know:  YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR.  The question is:
        Is what I get "enough" / workable?  Thanks.
        \_ Get SATA with a decent raid controller.  If it's not relevant for
           real time data access your main priority is being able to lose
           one drive and not lose data.  Do hot standby if you need to be
           able to continue without rebooting, although $+  -John
           \_ just make sure you are not running Solaris !!!
              \_ Fair enough--it sounded like he wanted something reasonably
                 elegantly improvised, hence my assumption of Linux/*BSD.
        \- what i have done because i dont trust the institutional backup
           people is to write a little program wich basically reads from
           an ssh inbound and dd's into a file. access is controled via
           ssk keys. so you can do something like
           "tar,ufsdump,cat importantfile | ssh locker@foo dump <label>"
           which then creates a file at
           server:/locker/hosts/client/<datestamp>label" ... so basically you
           are providing a bitstore which is agnostic about the dump format
           so people can write their own "backup clients" and have their
           own backup policies. it has worked pretty well for say 50-60
           machines and netapps. quite a cheep solution with a 3ware raid.--psb
        \_ I agree with John, go with SATA, significantly more bang for the
           buck performance-wise vs. IDE, easier to expand if you ever want
           more than eight drives, and still way cheaper than SCSI.  I
           actually set up something similar for a company I used to work for,
           and its still humming along happily several years later.  For this
           sort of thing, I actually prefer to use Linux or BSD software raid,
           since it's one less piece of hardware in the mix that can fail, and
           cpu cycles are cheap. -dans
2025/07/08 [General] UID:1000 Activity:popular
7/8     

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