On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 10:08:00AM -0500, lee wrote: > On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 09:42:57AM -0400, Douglas A. Tutty wrote: > > As far as I know, the only digital media that is designed to last that > > long on the shelf without data loss is tape. Since tape technology > > moves apace, you should probably archive a couple of tape drives along > > with the data. > > Well, I used to have some tape drives when the disks were smaller, but > I haven't looked into them for years. I always bought them used, and > they were still rather expensive. > > Can you get a reliable tape drive, incl. some tapes, that stores at > least 1TB per tape, for max. $200 now?
No. You can get used LTO-3 drives for about $250 on ebay. Tapes, of whatever capacity, end up costing about $50 each (I suppose unless you buy in great volume). You have to do the math once you determine your data set size to know whether its cheaper to have a lower-capacity drive with more tapes or a higher-capacity drive with fewer tapes. I just went through the math for my 12 GB data-set size and compared tape to USB sticks (not for archive, but for off-site backup). The break-even point was 72GB: less than that and USB sticks (16 GB) were cheaper; more than that and a used LTO-3 tape changer was cheaper. > > > Who would keep all the old hardware? And for what? And it's nothing > > > you could rely on. > > > > Actually, I need old hardware. Newer hardware gives my wife headaches. > > Why is that? It limits her to very slow hardware which could be a > problem sooner or later because the old hardware isn't up to the task > anymore. It depends on what she wants to do, of course ... Whether it limits her (actually me) or not is not the issue. If it gives her a headache then I can't use it at all, which is very limiting. Other than web-browsing (e.g. firefox/iceweasel), I can do everything on my 486 if I have enough drives. > > controller. What I really need is an old 100 MHz or slower SMP server > > with scsi. Or, at least, an ISA scsi card. > > You can still get that --- but for how long? > > > > > How do you maintain 15 or 30 year old hardware? > > > > Carefully. Memory is still available for my 486. The biggest problem > > for me is hard drives; they die and aren't made small anymore. Scsi > > fixes that (since there are no bios issues with scsi). > > Yeah, SCSI is great, but it's not affordable anymore. What's the price > for a 1TB SCSI disk now? Like $1500? And I'd need two because I don't > put data on disks that aren't at least RAID1. I've seen too many disks > failing for that. Look at the sweet-spot price point for used scsi drives, then get a used hardware raid card. My HP NetServer LPr (dual P-II-450) came with 1 GB ram, two 36 GB scsi drives, and a HP NetRaid 1si card for $65 (and all cables, terminators, etc). You can get the raid cards cheap if used. Get a 14-bay external scsi hot-swap enclosure to hook up to it (another $50) and load it up with the scsi drives (of whatever size). Of course, if you have to pay for power, I guess at some point its cheaper to buy two 1TB drives. > And look at the cables and terminators. You end up paying about $100 > just to connect a few SCSI disks. I still have the controller and > disks, but the cables got lost when moving. They'd be nice to have, > though rather loud, but I didn't want to spend all the money on > cables. You can get 1TB SATA disks for the price of the SCSI cables > and the terminators ... And forgo the reliability. You really comparing SATA to SCSI? SAS to SCSI sure; SATA to IDE sure. Check ebay for the cables and terminators. There are lots of computer recyclers that only sell through ebay. > In your case, you could have the computer for your wife boot over the > network and run it without any disks. Put the sever for that at some > place where it doesn't bother her. That would be about 500 feet away. First, I'd have to buy a lot that's big enough, then build a data centre 500 feet away... > > Also, do you really need the data to sit on a shelf for 30 years, or can > > it be cycled to new media every 5 years? > > I keep it on the disks. I don't have a solution for making backups > anymore. I'm going to need new disks soon, and I'm also going to need > a second set for backups (still better than none) --- but I don't have > the money for that atm. > > > There's something to be said for tarring to a raw disk partition (so > > there's no filesystem to be corrupted), and putting the same data to > > three different drives. Then using some data comparision utility > > (there's a deb available, I forget the name) to choose the correct block > > for every block of the data. This is far more reliable given three > > partially corrupted data sets than e.g. raid where if a certain number > > of blocks fail, the whole disk is marked bad. > > You want to buy 8 sets of 3 disks each for your dayly and monthly > backups and an SATA controller that can do hotplug? That's about > $2500 --- maybe you can get a tape drive for that kind of money. Check out addonics for drive cubes; they hold a few drives and hook up with either USB or eSATA; there's your hot-swap. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org