Re: Replacing tape changer with USB disk drives.

On Jun 16, 2008, at 3:59 PM, Christopher Sean Hilton wrote:
I run FreeBSD 7.0-STABLE on a file server and until recently used a Tape Changer for backups. I'm considering my options for a new backup solution. I'm actually thinking of ditching tape and using an externally attached USB or Firewire disk drive.

External drives make nice, fast external hot-standby backups. They are lousy for making long-term backups that you can take offsite, though. I can and have restored decade old 20/40GB and 40/80GB DLTtape IV cartridges, and have happily moved to a 220GB sDLT drive.

I've got a few 10-year-old SCSI drives that still work, but I've yet to find a commodity PATA IDE or SATA IDE brand of drives which make it much over 5 years, and a large percentage have issues trying to get much past 3 years of heavy usage.

My experimentation isn't giving me good feelings about doing this with FreeBSD. To start this off I installed an Adaptec USB 2.0 interface into my server. In the time that I've been working with it I notice that it periodically bogs down and that it has the potential to panic the kernel and cause a reboot. I recognize that this could be:

While I really liked the AHA 1540/2940 controllers, I'm dubious about Adaptec's USB controllers. I've got a few external drives with both USB2 and Firewire 400 interfaces, and they are faster and more reliable going over Firewire. YMMV...

Regards,
--
-Chuck

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