Digital BW, The Print

>
> Thanks, John,
>
> I have been using external hard drives for some while and have had
> failures with and without the "delayed write failure" messages.  I
> had another PC built on XP, the former was on 2k, and have crammed as
> many hard disks in as I can.  I have backups on at least two HDDs
> and, for archived files on CD or DVD.  I no longer buy HDDs in sizes
> greater than 80 Gb, though I have some of 120 Gb from before, because
> of the time traken to back up from CD.  I also buy Western Digital
> drives in pairs of the same manufacture date as the drives change
> circuit boards every few months and so I have a spare board if needs
> be. 
>
> Yesterday an external dive on the 2k machine was corrupted.  I had
> backups on two HDDs.  I used the internal spare on the XP machine and
> xcopy'd the file ascross. 
>
> My external drives on the XP machine are only switched on when in
> use, and then disconnected properly. I did not realize what the cause
> was, so, following your tip, I plan to buy another IDE PCI card for
> the XP machine and run external drives from its cable terminals but
> with power supplied externally.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Colin
>
>
>
Colin,


With your needs of a terabyte of storage or more you might want to
consider setting up a RAID Array, probably a RAID 5, possibly with
swappable drives. In a full tower case you can easily set up a five
drive or larger array that will give you both speed and redundancy. The
cost will probably be no more or not much more than you are presently
spending. Such a system including processor, MB, memory, drives etc can
probably be built for about a grand. The things to be aware of are all
of the drives should be the same make, model and capacity, the PC should
have a robust power supply and get a good controller card. I have used
SCSI in the past but I think I would go SATA now. Back up is always a
concern and none is perfect. In business a modest sized array would be
backed up to a DLT tape drive daily with off site storage but that is
big $$. anything less is a compromise. A catalog of DVD's will certainly
work but the indexing can be an interesting problem. You could also
consider building a raid machine as a server. Transferring data via
gigabyte Ethernet is perhaps somewhat slower than an internal array but
not so much it would be a major impediment.

Just some thoughts.

Roger

-- 
_______________________

Roger L Sopher
rlsopher@...
http://deCorrales.com
_______________________




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