On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 06:28:46PM -0400, Douglas A. Tutty wrote: > > Can you get a reliable tape drive, incl. some tapes, that stores at > > least 1TB per tape, for max. $200 now? > > No. You can get used LTO-3 drives for about $250 on ebay. Tapes, of > whatever capacity, end up costing about $50 each (I suppose unless you > buy in great volume).
Then hard disks are probably cheaper. > Other than web-browsing (e.g. firefox/iceweasel), I can do everything on > my 486 if I have enough drives. Hm, how do you manage without a web browser? And you can't play games with pretty graphics. > Look at the sweet-spot price point for used scsi drives, then get a used > hardware raid card. Nah, I'm not buying hard drives used. I've made bad experiences with that. > My HP NetServer LPr (dual P-II-450) came with 1 GB > ram, two 36 GB scsi drives, and a HP NetRaid 1si card for $65 (and all > cables, terminators, etc). You can get the raid cards cheap if used. > Get a 14-bay external scsi hot-swap enclosure to hook up to it (another > $50) and load it up with the scsi drives (of whatever size). Then you end up with a bunch of small drives, eventually slow ones, that make an awful lot of noise and heat and need a lot of power. And do these servers have 68-pin LVD and 50-pin cables and terminators? If they do, it would be cheaper than buying the cables new. But I'd have to find someone who sells his server. > Of course, if you have to pay for power, I guess at some point its > cheaper to buy two 1TB drives. Look at http://www.buy.com/prod/hp-sas-internal-hard-drive-1tb-7200rpm-serial-attached-scsi-internal/q/loc/101/209741096.html: You can get one 1TB SCSI disk for $620. It's a lot cheaper to buy two SATA disks instead. > > cables. You can get 1TB SATA disks for the price of the SCSI cables > > and the terminators ... > > And forgo the reliability. You really comparing SATA to SCSI? SAS to > SCSI sure; SATA to IDE sure. I'm comparing the prices. I used to use SCSI disks only, but it has become forbiddingly expensive. Keep in mind that $620 for a 1TB SCSI disk is "cheap". Look at http://www.directron.com/wd10eacs.html: You can get 1TB SATA for $86. That is $1240 for SCSI vs. $172 for SATA. SCSI is almost 10 times as expensive --- if you want to pay the difference, I'd gladly take the SCSI disk. And what about reliability? > Check ebay for the cables and terminators. There are lots of computer > recyclers that only sell through ebay. It's too troublesome to buy something off ebay here because there's no reasonable way to pay. I'd have to send money orders for that. > > In your case, you could have the computer for your wife boot over the > > network and run it without any disks. Put the sever for that at some > > place where it doesn't bother her. > > That would be about 500 feet away. First, I'd have to buy a lot that's > big enough, then build a data centre 500 feet away... Even if you put it into the basement? > > You want to buy 8 sets of 3 disks each for your dayly and monthly > > backups and an SATA controller that can do hotplug? That's about > > $2500 --- maybe you can get a tape drive for that kind of money. > > Check out addonics for drive cubes; they hold a few drives and hook up > with either USB or eSATA; there's your hot-swap. But they want $250 for a casing that can hold only 3 disks. I guess I meant 8 sets of 2 disks (not 3), so you'd end up with 16 disks and 8 cases: about $2700. It's not like I had money to waste. And USB? I wonder what happens when you try to run two disks on an USB port as RAID1. Is that fast enough to backup like 700GB over night? -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
