Transportable HDD recommendations or warnings

[Paul Lussier]

Ted Roche <tedroche at tedroche.com> writes:

> I see the local big boxes have regular promotions for Western
> Digitals, Seagates, Maxtors and SimpleTechs.  Any recommendations
> pro- or con- or are these pretty much commodity items?

How often are you planning on transporting these drives around?  Keep
in mind, drives are very susceptiple to vibration damage.  The more
they are transported around, and powered on and off, the more likely
they are to fail early.

You might be better writing the images to DVD or tape and sending
those off site.  Another option is to completely forget about keeping
an "image" around and setting up something like FAI, Kickstart, Ghost,
System Imager, etc.  These systems can all be configured to re-install
the "correct" image on to a specified architecture.  Some are more
dynamic than others like Kickstart and FAI, whereas others, like Ghost
and SI work on the "golden image" principle.

The down-side of the "golden image" is that it's rather inflexible.
It's not unreasonable to expect a video card or hard drive to migrate
around to several different machines as older ones die out and newer
systems come in as replacements, or components get upgraded piecemeal.
So, if a newer video card gets installed in an older system, the
"golden image" may no longer work.  Whereas something like FAI or
Kickstart can dynamically determine the video card at install time and
install the correct drivers for it.

I inherently dislike the idea of storing "images".  It implies that
your configuration isn't going to change, and change is something
inherent to computers, they are not static :)

Just my .00002 drachmas.
-- 
Seeya,
Paul