> I am doing something very similar. I backup to external USB's, which I > leave connected to the server for obviously days at a time ... zfs send > followed by scrub. You might want to consider eSATA instead of USB. Just a > suggestion. You should be able to go about 4x-6x faster than 27MB/s.
I did strongly consider going with eSATA. What I really wanted to use was FireWire 800 as it is reasonably fast and the ability to daisy chain devices is very appealing, but some of the stuff I've read regarding the state of OpenSolaris FireWire drivers scared me off. I decided against eSATA because I don't have any eSATA ports. I could buy a controller or run SATA to eSATA cables of the four available onboard ports, but either way, when/if I run out of ports, that's it. With USB, I can always use a hub if needed (at even slower speeds). If OpenSolaris supported SATA port multipliers, I'd have definitely gone with eSATA. The speed issue isn't really critical to me, especially if I'm doing incremental send/receives. Recovering my data from backup will be a drag, but it is what it is. I decided cheap and simple was best, and went with USB. > I have found external enclosures to be unreliable. For whatever reason, > they commonly just flake out, and have to be power cycled. This is > unfortunately disastrous to solaris/opensolaris. The machine crashes, you > have to power cycle, boot up in failsafe mode, import the pool(s) and then > reboot once normal. This is what I've overwhelmingly heard as well. Most people point to the controllers in the enclosures. If I could find a reasonable backup method that avoided external enclosures altogether, I would take that route. For cost and simplicity it's hard to beat externals. > I am wondering, how long have you been doing what you're doing? Do you > leave your drives connected all the time? Have you seen similar reliability > issues? What external hardware are you using? Not long (1 week), so I'm just getting started. I don't leave the drives connected. Plug them in, do a backup, zpool export, unplug and throw in my safe. It's far from great, but it beats what I had before (nothing). I plan to do an incremental zfs send/receive every 2-4 weeks depending on how much new data I have. I can't attest to any sort of reliability as I've only been at it for a very short period of time. I am using 2TB WD Elements drives (cheap). This particular model (WDBAAU0020HBK-NESN) hasn't been on the market too terribly long. There is one review on Newegg of someone having issues with one from the start. It sucks, but I think the reality is that it's pretty much a crapshoot when it comes to reliability on external drives/enclosures. > I started doing this on one system (via eSATA) about a year ago. It worked > flawlessly for about 4 months before the disk started crashing. I started > doing it on another system (via USB) about 6 months ago. It just started > crashing a couple of weeks ago. > > I am now in the market to try and identify any *well made* external > enclosures. The best I've seen so far is the Dell RD1000, but we're talking > crazy overpriced, and hard drives that are too small to be useful to me. If you find something good, please let me know. There are a lot of different solutions for a lot of different scenarios and price points. I went with cheap. I won't be terribly surprised if these drives end up flaking out on me. You usually get what you pay for. What I have isn't great, but it's better than nothing. Hopefully, I'll never need to recover data from them. If they end up proving to be too unreliable, I'll have to look at other options. Eric >> If we still are capped out at 2TB as the limit for a physical >> device in 2 years, I solemnly pledge now that I will drink a six-pack >> of beer in his name. > > I solemnly pledge to do it anyway. And why wait? ;-) > _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
