On Tue, 2007-05-01 at 10:26 -0500, Jeffrey L. Taylor wrote: > I looking to buy an external hard drive to backup (not archive) my laptop. It > has USB 2.0. I am looking for a desktop solution, i.e., don't need nor want > to pay for portable powered USB drives. Capacity 80GB to 160GB range. Any > recommendations and/or condemnations?
I have had some experience (not all good) with CoolGear Boxes. They are a US company and I had to obtain them through a colleague resident in the US as they didn't seem to have distribution channels to NZ or provision for international purchase via the web. The earlier boxes proved marginal in operation drawing their USB current from the server. This has been fixed in later offerings. When I googled for coolgear recently, their website did not list the boxes I have among their products. They had a variety of offerings. My choice was a 2 tray box, with a single USB2.0 connector. Each try is keylocked and is levered into the box where a SCSI physical connector is used (even with IDE or SATA drives). The backplane has hotplug circuitry. The trays are proprietary. They have different boxes for IDE (my choice), or SATA, or SCSI. You cannot remove them except by turning the key (which disconnect power from the tray). My purpose was to use the USB boxes as replacements for obsolescent Tandberg SLR24 tape drives. The IDE choice is the cheapest. My hopes to use them on a client site foundered on SUSE 9.0's unpredictable and inhumanly named mount points. It wasn't an easy option to upgrade the SUSE as they had proprietary Informix software. I have now nearly completed the upgrade for them on a 2nd machine and will change them over to using the USB drives as archive and tape options. I hope to write scripts which will check that the devices are mounted then call the appropriate commands (tar and ontape) to complete the archive and backup. I have found performance disappointing (probably a side-effect of the sync mount option) compared with the tape drives. But it is a cheap solution and the IDE entry level HDDs are readily available. > > TIA, > Jeffrey -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
