OK, I thought this issue was dead but /. got me going again. Hotswapping IDE drives is, IMHO a grail to be quested for low-end IDE servers something of interest to many small businesses in Australia. Firewire may be the answer.
The reasons for me are basically cost related. I can buy three spare IDE 40Gb HDDs for the cost of a 10Gb TR5 Tape unit. The tapes cost about $55 ea so 4 tapes = one disk. A year from now, the tape unit will be obsolete as the HDDs will be 100-200Gb for $200 so it'll take 10-20 tapes to do a base backup. Instead the HDD base backup option with a CD-RW for incrementals and archiving is a much better and more cost effective solution for your SME (Small Medium Enterprise). Big problem being that you CAN'T HOT SWAP (reliably). Before you mention SCSII, yes I do know it exists, I do know what it's capable of and yes it's a superior technology.. blah blah. It's also twice the cost per for HDDs and a LOT more for the total solution. In fact there is nothing to stop you running SCSI for the main systems drive but using firewire to backup the HDDs on cheap slow IDE drives. Currently IDE hot swapping is unreliable with comments on various groups about it trashing hdds. There are workarounds but none are too good. Firewire components however can be hot swapped and some bright sparks have come up with the concept of a drive bay with a Firewire2IDE converter on the back of them so that you can swap in an ide hdd while continuing to access the other hdds - reason being it's running off the Firewire PCI instead of the IDE bus. I've found one in the US that does this job but its $159US!!! I don't know of any devices retailed or distributed in Aus that accomplish this task. If you do, please let me know. Also interested in comments and flames re this approach, the question was posed by another party on slug only about three weeks ago so I hope this is of interest to them at least. Research: Firewire HDD: 400Mbps, connects internally to a firewire card. Requires a scsi-rescan.sh to be run after loading and a umount then scsi-rescan.sh to dismount. Currently there are firewire external cases retailing for $176inc gst - Skymaster IEEE 1394 Firewire HDD Case. Just add HDD. Here's a review of it, not every promising! http://www.dansdata.com/1394drive.htm its a bit old - 20Gb drives for $300.. I would prefer a drive bay solution like fire Vue 1394 IDE Hot Swap Bay from www.granitedigital.com $159US but at a lot less cost. Currently the external case is looking like the go, you would think that the TW market would have dozens of copycats. TIA Stuart. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
