On Sunday 30 June 2002 05:26, Mike Delaney wrote: >On Sun, Jun 30, 2002 at 01:14:43AM -0700, Anthony A. D. Talltree wrote: >> >100 gigabyte hard disk is less than $200 >> >> Where? I'm not even aware of a 100G disk being sold. > >Seagate and IBM sell 120 GB ATA drives. Street price is around > $120-140. Seagate also has a 180 GB SCSI/FC-AL disk in their > catalog, which for the moment is the largest single spindle on > the market. Lists for $1800, street price seems to be in the > neigborhood of $1300.
Both WD(spit) and Maxtor are now selling ATA-133 320 giggers at less than 500 bucks on the street. We just made up a software raid server using Promise 20269 cards and 4 of the maxtor 160's, been up about 3 months now, runs rsync to backup the rest of the places data in a 3 tier directory lashup so we have the father and son both covered. They're in removeable trays and we've tested them many times by hot-swapping. So far there have been no problems in its recovery from a simulated disk failure, taking only about half an hour to bring the 4th, freshly formatted disk back into full service each time we've done the swapout. Now admittedly this isn't offsite backup, and I'd love to have convinced them of the wisdom of grabbing a snapshot of it nightly, but that snapshot would cost us >4x the $$ of that whole server. Its also made us a lot less reticent about formatting a disk on any of the business related machines cause once the machine has enough opsys to run the networking, a full recovery to last nights status is only a piece of cat5 and half an hour or so away, which is much faster than affordable (read dds2 dat) tape. >> >Worse, tapes don't last, they have a three year shelf life if >> > they are stored properly >> >> Say *what*??? This is absurd. Agreed. We drug out a u-matic video that was >20 years old and played it just last week. >Indeed. DLTs claim a projected shelf life of 30 years, however > shelf life is really only a concern for archival storage (and > after 30 years, finding a drive and a system that will talk to it > could be as much of a problem as reading a tape that's degraded > over time. I hear the few working 7 tracks left are in fairly > high demand.). For a daily backup medium, pass count is much > more important. > >> >and the tape doesn't physically break when it winds around the >> > spools... >> >> ? The only tape medium with any kind of breakage issues of >> which I'm aware is the TK50, where the hook would sometimes come >> off. If someone is trying to use a TK50 drive for backups >> today, they've got bigger problems. > >Yeah, TK50s are, um, ancient. However, DLTs use the same single > reel and hook and loop system as TK50s, so they can fail in the > same way. Forunately, the drives are far more reliable in that > regard. I've seen only one broken DLT leader so far (knocks on > wood). -- Cheers, Gene AMD K6-III@500mhz 320M Athlon1600XP@1400mhz 512M 99.03% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
