I have a client to needs to take "a lot" of data (many TB) and
archive it off-line. We are going to use 1.5TB disk drives as the
off-line storage medium. (Please don't reply saying how great tapes
would be for this.)
The trick is that we want two identical copies (one on-site, one
off-site). We could do it the old-school way, one disk at a time, but
this archival process will be an on-going need. So we want a way to
make the two copies "automatically", and without having to manually
process and catalog two disks every time.
The best solution (I think) would be to use an eSATA disk case,
similar to an external USB or Firewire chassis, which has hot-swappable
bays, and a built-in RAID-1 controller. Then we just pop two disks in,
make the archive copy (and catalog it), and pull the disks out. Then we
hand one of the two disks to the off-site manager and be done.
But I suspect that plan will fail because the RAID-1 disks will be
useless to anyone who does not have the specific make-and-model of eSATA
drive case. For example, an LSI card will not recognize a 3ware RAID
set on a batch of disks, so I suspect that a simple (non-RAID) SATA
controller on a mobo will not be able to do anything with a single disk
of the RAID-1 setup mentioned above.
Or am I wrong because RAID-1 does no striping, just simple
mirroring? Does anyone have experience with this?
Is there a better way to copy tons of stuff to two disk
simultaneously, AND be able to take a single disk of the pair to do a
restore? (Another concern I have is that hardware "rebuilding" a new
RAID-1 array each time will add hours of delay to the process, even
though the two new disks are blank.)
Any advice is greatly appreciated...
Thanks,
Derek
