On Mar 22, 2008, at 4:15 PM, William Robb wrote: >> >> Through a USB port? Yuck. Performance will be sucky. You want a >> FireWire 400 or 800 port, or a fast SCSI interface. > > I'm thinking of the Data Robotics unit for external storage, not as > a working drive. I have five > drives in my computer, and will be adding a sixth at some point, > removing a Gigabyte I-Ram to > make room for it. My final drive configuration will be 2 striped > pairs and one mirrored drive in > the computer. This will give me pretty much all the drive > performance I need, but I like the > idea of an external array for redundant data storage. > I'm thinking that for this purpose, a USB interface will be fine, > though obviously an eSata or > Firewire would be better.
If performance isn't an issue, yeah, it will work. I did a test running a system clone to both 100G FW400 and 100G USB 2.0 drives of otherwise identical spec. The FW400 clone took 30% less time than the USB 2.0 clone. That's a big hit when you're talking about 50 Gbytes of data. The FW800 interface is almost exactly twice as fast as the FW400 too, it completes the same clone in about 52% of the time that the FW400 drive does. My config is two internal SATA drives setup as a 1T single volume RAID, which mirrors out to a standalone 1T external and another 1T dual-drive RAID volume through FW800 on backups. Performance is very good. Godfrey -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
