In a message dated 10/10/05 Bruce Johnson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
<< [snip] IDE is perfectly trustworthy. I help support ~300+ systems, Mac and PC. EVERY one of them runs IDE drives. We get *maybe* a handful of drive failures in a year. I myself have had only one IDE drive fail. Dropping it three feet on it's edge on a hard concrete floor will do that :-/>> ------ Yeah, I foolishly set a SCSI drive on end on a hard surfaced workbench, accidentally knocking it over killed it. ------ <<Used drives of questionable provenance will always be more troublesome. Sure you can buy a bunch of used SCSI 18 and 36GB drives out there, but crap expands to fill the available space. It's vastly simpler and cheaper to buy more than one big IDE drive and have a live backup.>> ------ Agreed, just did this yesterday. ------ <<Run it as a mirrored raid and you'll always have a backup. (This is doable in 10.4 at least and the RAID is selectable as the startup.) >> ------ OK, here's where I question the reliability of mirrored drives. Certainly if one of the mirrored drives has a physical failure the other drive had all same data intact; no problem just replace the failed drive with the good one. . . .But what if the directory of one of the mirrored drives gets completely hosed? Since the other drive is mirrored the directory of the other drive is also hosed. I encountered this problem (twice) on an old PCI Mac with a pair of SCSI drives under OS 8.6. Fortunately I had a secondary backup and experienced very little data loss. As far as the failed mirrored drives they both had to be initialized and the data restored. This was after using all the (OS 8/9) tools I had available like DiskWarrior, TechTool and the infamous Norton DD and a bunch of Freeware mounting utilities like Mt.Everything and SCSIProbe. The lesson I learned is just to do manual backups to a backup drive -- not that hard. Are mirrored RAID under OS X is more reliable? --glen (digest mode) -- G-List is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | -- We have Apple Refurbished Monitors in stock! | & CDRWs on Sale! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> G-List list info: <http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[email protected]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/g-list%40mail.maclaunch.com/> iPod Accessories for Less at 1-800-iPOD.COM Fast Delivery, Low Price, Good Deal www.1800ipod.com
