Re: Which hardware for saving backups?
On Mon, Jun 11, 2007 at 10:22:33PM +0200, Mitja Podreka wrote:
> Douglas Allan Tutty wrote:
> >Something to consider: The price of an external multi-drive enclosure
> >with cables would probably cost more than an old spare computer (PII?)
> >plus a decent PCI ethernet card. I did that with my 486 but with ISA it
> >only does 10-T ethernet.
> >
> >Poke around the school. You may be surprised what old computers are
> >around that work perfectly for what you want.
> >
> I had something like this in mind as I know the faculty has a lot of old
> computers lying around. I will probably start with one drive and after
> testing move to some RAID configuration. Is software RAID good enough
> for this purpose or is better to buy RAID controller?
>
Consider:
with software raid1 you can pull a drive and put it on a shelf
someplace safe. If disaster strikes, you take that drive, put it in a
new box and can access it as a regular drive (as if it wasn't part of a
raid setup), add a second drive to that 1-drive array and be back in
business with raid1 on new hardware.
With hardware raid, the drives and the controller go together. You
can't take a drive and put it on the shelf as above unless you also
store an identical hardware raid card.
Linux software raid is solid and reliable.
If there are lots of old computers around, take the biggest case and
salvage the drives from the other computers. Their age may mean that
they are totally reliable. So create multiple software raid arrays (for
redundancy) and put them together with LVM to give you the capacity you
need.
Doug.
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