Advice on Removeable hard drives needed

We are looking at buying a server to use as a backup server for the rest of the network.

Currently we use a tape drive in one server but the tapes are filling up, they are pricey, and the arcserve software is awkward and time-consuming to use in the event of a restore.

What I plan to do is to **** all the data onto the new server during the night and then back up to a removeable HDD during the day (one drive for each working day). Drives are almost down to the cost of a single tape now anyway and data would be far easier to restore. A Tape will still be used once a month in our current tape device as a permanent backup, never to be re-used.

Can anyone give me any advice on recommendations on how to proceed? The amount of data is around 500Gb so transfer speed may be an issue. Do I use a SATA drive in an external caddy? or would a USB drive be ok?

I suppose a SATA drive in a caddy will still be connected via USB, or does anyone know of an internal bay that can be used? Hot swapping would be good too.

There may be other possibilties I have missed, I know Dell do a removeable drive but it is only 120Gb max, so any advice or thoughts would be very welcome.

Thanks

 

Hi Grunty,

Look into eSATA which the external connection of SATA drives.

If you only have PCI slots:
eSATA-150 RAID External 2-Ports eSATA Type PCI Card
http://www.satagear.com/CG-119e_SATA_PCI_Card.html

Lots of SATA equipment listed at that site:
http://www.satagear.com/eSATA_Products.html
Look through the left-hand menu, you will probably see the type of equipment you want.

Matt

 

Since you said you are looking at buying a server, I'd start you off quite differently. Forget about the external drives - they are nice add-ons for those who can't configure or re-configure an existing machine but that is not your situation.

As an example, you might want to consider a relatively small system drive and mirror it to an identical drive - thats two drives for starters for your OS and core program files. Then add a couple of large data drives bringing it up to four total. Now, add two removable drive bays with HDD caddy's and two backup drives for a total of 6 (4 fixed, two removable).

Now, Drives 1 & 2 are your OS & programs and they are mirrored so if one fails, you have no downtime. Replace the bad drive and rebuild your mirror. Drive 3 can be your data drive and drive 4 can be for data backups and image backups. Drive 5 & 6 can be used to backup your backups or backup data from other machines (both desktops and/or servers). Since 5 & 6 are removable, you can have a couple more caddy's with HDD's available and store valueable information offsite. The program I would recommend for backing up data is Karen's Replicator. It will run automatically according to whatever schedule and whatever file stores you select. it will run across a network to mapped drives or other machines. It is fast ,efficient and reliable.

If you want to tell me that you can't configure a server this way, then you are shopping with the wrong vendor. The above example is simplified but should give you a good basis for comparison.