Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2008 21:25:05 -0400 From: Christopher Sean Hilton <chris@vindaloo.com> To: Chuck Swiger <cswiger@mac.com> Cc: FreeBSD Questions <questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Replacing tape changer with USB disk drives. Message-ID: <BDEE6DF9-49CD-4391-AE10-52CA26628740@vindaloo.com> In-Reply-To: <103D0CB9-6E36-4D84-A0F6-D2C944C101E0@mac.com> References: <F551340C-1A3B-4357-9EC8-2FB2904ECCDD@vindaloo.com> <103D0CB9-6E36-4D84-A0F6-D2C944C101E0@mac.com>
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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 .~ ~ .--.~ ~.--.~~.--.~~.--.~~.--.~~.--.~~.--.~~.--.~~.--.~~.--.~~.--.~~.--.~~. "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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