I have an 800GB+ drive array at work. Currently, a little less than half of that is used. For backups, I have been using 2 sets of USB2.0 external drives, one 300GB and one 120GB. I really like this setup, especially with rdiff-backup.
But I’m running out of room. I purchased two brand-new Seagate 400GB USB drives, but these things are crap. I’m sending them back to Daddy Dell tomorrow. Any suggestions from you nerds out there? I need to be able to make nightly backups and transport them home everyday. We do not want to use a backup service, and our data changes far too often to consider using rdiff-backup or the like remotely. We have to do it in-house, and the medium has to be a directly-accessible, ext3-capable one.
Tom’s hardware had an article a few months back on this:
http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20050225/index.html
but if you just looking at drives, i’ve had much luck with hitachi’s
Matt: Thanks for the link, but Tom’s rarely provides any useful info for folks who work primarily with Linux.
I’ll check out some hitachi drives.
Are you using USB2, or usb1? USB2 should be OK, assuming the drive is a high performer. Seagate should be good.
otherwise, external SCSI disk or tape.
I wouldn’t use ONE set of disks, because if you perished in a fire at work, or got into a wreck and they flew out a window on the same day the office sprinklers went of….
For tape, only LTO-2 would be big enough to consider.
Otherwise, you could set up an IDE or SCSI array on linux with gigabit or 10gigabit ethernet links, or fibre or target mode scsi, and use that as a portable backup server.
Well, it has a good review on the araid drive packs, which are rather transparent to operating systems since they just consist of a simple hardware raid mirror config with little laptop drives.
I like the SAN at my office, it works very well and backs up to tape nightly using Tivoli. It also works well with sharing data across our HP servers, AIX machines, and mainframes (z/os).