Transportable HDD recommendations or warnings

[Dan Jenkins]

Ted Roche wrote:

> I've got a client who would like to image his half-dozen workstations  
> and store the images off-site as part of a disaster recovery plan.
>
> We're planning on using Knoppix and partimage to snapshot the machines,
>
> The workstations are run-of-the-mill Dell Dimensions, fairly new, so  
> USB 2.0 should be acceptable.
>
> Guesstimating ~ 5 - 10 Gb per workstation, so most medium capacity  
> HDDs should be sufficient. Two separate HDDs for odd- and even-month  
> backups could be used for redundancy and avoiding single-point-of- 
> failure. (There is already a separate backup system in place for day- 
> to-day operational data and documents).
>
> 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?

My experience with this method has been variable. Firstly, and most 
critical, transfer speeds were quite slow. It seemed like a buffering 
issue. The drive would show activity for a burst, then no activity for a 
longer period, yielding about one 1/10th of the Windows transfer speed. 
I used a  Gentoo-based System Rescue CD at first and then tested with a 
Knoppix live CD - both were 2.4 kernels. Replacing the external drive 
with another one tripled the speed. So I saw differences with the drive 
enclosures. I did not attempt to solve the problem by tuning anything in 
Linux. It turned out to actually be faster to use backup partimage 
through the network than with the external drive, so I switched to that.

The first enclosure ran very hot. The drive eventually failed, however, 
it was an older drive to begin with, so that is not conclusive. The 
second enclosure, which did have better cooling, was also the one that 
ran faster. Both of these were simply enclosures into which we installed 
hard drives ourselves. The first one was really cheap (about $25). The 
second, which worked better, was $80. I haven't used the most recent 
external drive units. My experience is from last year's models.

YMMV.

-- 
Dan Jenkins (dan at rastech.com)
Rastech Inc., Bedford, NH, USA --- 1-603-206-9951
*** Technical Support Excellence for over a Quarter Century