On Thursday 12 September 2002 04:28, Brian Jonnes wrote:
>First off, thanks to all for the info; I at least now have a base
> from which to start.
>
>> the small business with say 5-10 major machines to backup, a
>> dedicated software raid server with a rack of big drives,
>> running rsync, also has a cost and speed advantage.  I know of
>> one such setup with a capacity of 320 gigs in 4 160 gig drives
>> that does its
>
>Hell, you might as well start talking Coda to me. Which is another
>possibility.
>
>> about 1600 USD at the time.  Is it as dependable as tape? Time
>> will tell.  Can you take it offsite?  In a sense, yes, by
>> cycling enough drives thru each slot in the array and letting
>> the raid rebuild
>
>I'm not really keen on this idea. Although relative to the price
> of a DDS drive it is affordable (for just one or two harddrives).
> My main problem is that the drives will be handled by average
> users. Hrm.
>
>..Brian

We at first were going to use some removable drive bays, but had 
trouble with the ata-133 settings and the extra cabling, so the 
removeable kits are still on the shelf.  They work fine with ata100 
stuff though as we're doing that with video drives for program 
delay and transport now.  But thats temporary since the mpeg-2 
standard doesn't do closed captioning which gets us phone calls 
from the hard of hearing folks.  We only do that when the real 
dvc-pro machine is down for service, its our "program" backup.  Now 
if we could figure out how to automate the removal and replacement 
of several hundred surface mounted electrolytic capacitors when one 
of them starts pixelizing.  Its hell on one's back, sitting at the 
bench working under a magnifying lamp doing that, takes 3 or 4 days 
to go all the way thru one of those $3k-$7k+ machines.  Thats the 
major failure mechanism for a dvc-pro tape machine.  :-(

-- 
Cheers, Gene
AMD K6-III@500mhz 320M
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