Hard disks

[kentborg at borg.org (Kent Borg)]

On Fri, Apr 19, 2002 at 12:57:20PM -0400, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> I am considering buying a new hard disk for my Linux PC for the explicit 
> purpose of backup. 
> [...]
> However, tapes to provide a compact copy of data that can be placed 
> offsite. 

The thing that really bugs me about tapes is that they are so slow.
So maybe I have a complete backup when my disk dies.  So maybe I am
there to restore from tape onto a fresh disk.  How long will it take
for modern amounts of data?  Also, when compared to modern disks,
tapes are not so small nor are they particularly cheap.  Alas, IDE
disks are not inherently hot-pluggable either (though add-on kits
supposedly make them so), but they seem to be pretty
tough--tigerdirect.com doesn't bother to ship them in any special
padding.

> In any case, if I have a hard disk failure I should be able to
> recover quickly.

If hard disk failure is what you are afraid of, consider a pair of
disks in RAID 1.  If accidental deletion of (or other such damage to)
files is your concern, your idea of rsyncing to a normally unmounted
partition is good (or ping pong between two).  And why not do both?
Use RAID 1 for normal operations, and use normally off-line RAID 1
volumes for boo-boo recovery.

> So, what I would like to hear is reliability of Maxtor vs. Western Digital.

I haven't been hearing about any differences between the two and so
have been buying the less expensive Maxtors in my recent hardware
binge buying.  Also, if you are well backed up and nicely redundant a
slight reliability difference in drives might not matter.


-kb