We're soon to try this approach by installing a cheap 'hotswap' drive bay with a standard promise ata100. I'm nervous as the documentation indicates that it's possible but not advisable to power down the drive whilst the computer is up. The drive bay is not a fancy promise raid controller and hot swap drives as we decided it was over-kill for requirements.
Advantages of this approach are that when you upgrade all the disks in a year to 100Gb, it doesn't require a new tape unit @ a couple of grand. The second hand ads are full of 2Gb tape units which used to match 2x the largest hdd. Tape units are ridiculously expensive. Disadvantages are that it sounds unreliable - everything you don't want from a backup device. For my situ, we'll probably test, test, test then I'll report back with success/failures. Another option is the iomega 'peerless' which costs about a $US400 with extra disks about $US200 I think. Backs up 20Gb via USB @ 15Mb/sec with a firewire interface. You can also get it with USB. I've just emailed them to see if it works with Linux. Recommend that this is verified before purchase. http://www.iomega.com. There are also 'hardware' solutions that will do duplication of two hdds. 'duplidisk' retails for about 900-1000 without hdds. It does hard-mirroring as soon as a second drive is placed in it. I have no experience with it so wouldn't recommend it necessarily. BTW, If you know anyone who wants to go promise RAID fast track 100, i've a card and 3 hot swap bays for sale (almost) new and unloved from a cancelled order gathering dust. Does ide raid 0,1, 0+1. Apparently very fast. You need red hat 7.1 to run under linux but works great with win2000 so I hear. Happy to sell for less than retail. HTH Stuart Guthrie Gnuthad wrote: >On 1 Nov 2001, at 1:08, Andre Pang wrote: > >>On Thu, Nov 01, 2001 at 12:19:30AM +1100, Gnuthad wrote: >> >>>Try Jaycar. Odd place I know, but std IDE caddies are $35, $40 with 3 >>>fans (2 front, 1 rear), want it as hotswap? $85. >>>Add the IDE drive of your choosing, right up to ATA100. >>> >>Are you saying that all you need to hot-swap IDE are the special >>hot-swap caddies, without a fancy pantsy IDE controller? i.e. >>don't need to buy the FastTrak Pro if you want hot-swap. >> >>If that's the case, that makes hot-swap hard disks disgustingly >>cheap. >> > >I don't claim to be an IDE hotswap expert, but the hotswap drive bays >at Jaycar are designed for standard IDE interfaces. From memory, even >Promise RAID cards are standard between the hotswap and std drives, >just add in the hotswap caddies (@ $120US pr) to make it hotswap. >Anyone know the details of IDE hotswap caddies? Do they require a >special hotswap controller as well or will they work on a std >controller? > >Gnuthad > > >PGP Key Block available at: >http://aussie.mine.nu/aussie/pgp_key.txt > -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
