Hard disks

[Jerry Feldman]

I am considering buying a new hard disk for my Linux PC for the explicit 
purpose of backup. 
In the past, I have been burned by removable devices (tapes and disks). 
Also, in the past, I have had good luck with Western Digital. 
Currently EIDE 100GB are running about $130. WD seems to be about $20 
higher than Maxtor. 
My strategy is to have one backup HD and one primary HD, and maybe use the 
8GB as a backup boot system. 
The reason I don't like tapes is:
1. In the past I have found them to be unreliable. When I have had to 
recover, I found the tapes had problems.
2. I've got to remember to leave a tape in the drive for overnight auto 
backup. 
3. Manual backups take too much time. 
However, tapes to provide a compact copy of data that can be placed 
offsite. 

With a big hard drive, I can save several backup generations, and mount 
only the backup partition when actually doing a backup and recovery. (I 
actually use rsync to mirror my wife's Windows system). As far as my home 
directory, I back it up nightly onto the second drive as a compressed tar 
archive. 
In any case, if I have a hard disk failure I should be able to recover 
quickly. 

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


What I currently do is to backup my home and downloads directory to an 8GB 
drive and my wife's PC to my primary drive.   
--
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Associate Director
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9