[KLUG Members] Firewire 1TB drive under Linux worth trying?

[John Pesce]

On Mon, 2004-05-03 at 11:07, Rusty Yonkers wrote:
> > A fixed disk can never ever replace a tape drive.  Using fixed
> > disks for
> > backup is just plain nuts, IMNSHO.
> > 
> 
> I humbly disagree.  Disk is going to be faster than tape, always. 
> Also retrieval of data for onesy twosy restores is going to be like
> lightining faster!  Now with Serial ATA (SATA) it is really cheap. 
> The SATA standard also supports hotswap drives.  At the same spindle
> speeds there is negliglble difference between SCSI and SATA, even
> with multiple drives attached.  SATA has no slowdown with multiple
> drives like the original ATA spec did.  

See. That is where I was going. I've got a 1TB database that is
constantly being manipulated and added to by a live stream of data. I'm
always looking for a better way to take snap shots of it. Tapes are not
that big or fast. I can produce a mountain of them in no time. When /if
/ I hope not I ever experience a crash it will take days to restore the
raw data from tape and weeks to to process it to a working state at the
same time I would be back logging the live stream. I tend to lean toward
redundant immediate data copies that can be synced nightly. 

The 1 TB firewire drive looked promising in a software mirroring RAID
configuration. Who wouldn't love a 1 TB redundant array for $2000 with
sustained 55MB/s. I just can't get a clear answer on the state of
firewire 800 on a 2.4 or 2.6 kernel. The linux firewire driver site
seems to tell me that it is still alpha to beta and that it shouldn't be
used in production, yet some users say they have used it for years
without a problem.