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 |
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