[AccessD] OMG!!!!!!

Jim Lawrence accessd at shaw.ca
Thu Jan 18 01:15:35 CST 2007


Hi John:

If you buy one very large drive then the costs are through the roof. That is
why I was suggesting a clutch of smaller drives partitioned together as one
big drive. You could also go the SATA drive routine. A number of
manufactures make motherboards with 2 SATA connectors built on them. That
means 7 drives per connection. With enough cheap drives a backup solution
can be created. (Of course there may be other physical limits...) 

As I see it you have to have a backup system and the solution is either
expensive or very expensive.

Jim    

-----Original Message-----
From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
[mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of JWColby
Sent: Wednesday, January 17, 2007 5:56 PM
To: 'Access Developers discussion and problem solving'
Subject: Re: [AccessD] OMG!!!!!!

Jim,

Mirrors are fine for small data needs but the cost is 50% anyway.  One drive
for data, one for the mirror. If you need a single large drive, 750 gig
drives are as big as you can get, and they cost ~$350 or so right now, so
that is $700 for 700 (real) MB and that is as big as it gets.  Plus, if you
use the controller built in to the motherboard they are not particularly
fast.  That is a great solution though if that falls within your needs.  For
reliably protecting music or software or document archives it is "good
enough".

OTOH, I have a single partition that is > 1 tbyte, and I am trying to backup
a half dozen BIG SQL Server data files, so a simple "copy everything" just
won't work very well.  I'm still thinking about how to do this.  It probably
will be a low power "box" at the other end of a LAN cable.  I may go with a
"hardware assisted" cheap raid card to get the speed up, and perhaps a raid
5 to get some level of redundancy in case of a disk failure.  If I can get
compression in the backup then a tbyte backup array will handle the backup.


Another very real issue with backing up large files like this is simply the
time required to do the copy.  I have 1 gBit LAN between all of my boxes,
but it still requires 15-20 minutes just to copy a 30g file.  OTOH, the
options are limited.  Economical tape backup simply doesn't exist for this
size disk, and DVDs are not an option either.  Disk backup is about the only
option for someone in my shoes.

John W. Colby
Colby Consulting
www.ColbyConsulting.com

-----Original Message-----
From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
[mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Jim Lawrence
Sent: Wednesday, January 17, 2007 5:24 PM
To: 'Access Developers discussion and problem solving'
Subject: Re: [AccessD] OMG!!!!!!

Well John; 

The RAID drives are mostly duplication... just add a couple or 320GB, single
partition drives ($200.00) and you could have a mirrored backup. Fast,
reliable and (in context) cheap... who says you can't have it all

I have done this using an Ubuntu Linux. It uses a real old box (1.5 years
old with four older small 100GB drives), the install was easier than
Windows, (and when I say it is easy it really is. The only prompts that
require entry are how much space to allocate for the partition(s) and an
admin password.), it took only 15 minutes to connect to the network (which
has always been the biggest pain when managing mix systems). The resultant
partition created was across the all the drives making 400GBs of space. It
is real cheap and fast. 

I have been selling this backup concept to clients who want a reliable cheap
backup and have made a few sales. Even one government office is seriously
planning on contracting my services.

Jim

  

-----Original Message-----
From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
[mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of JWColby
Sent: Wednesday, January 17, 2007 12:47 PM
To: 'Access Developers discussion and problem solving'
Subject: Re: [AccessD] OMG!!!!!!

Jim,

I have WAY more free room than that.  My system drive (C:) has several
gigabytes left, hundreds of times the 20mb on that systems drive.  

;-)

If it weren't for the cost of a high speed RAID controller, massive capacity
hard drives are now within reach for us average joes.  I have a real need of
course, but I bought 8 320g Seagates for $95 each delivered.  The RAID
controller cost me 60% of that amount at $500.  In the end, for about $1300
I built a raid 6 raid array which contains (after deducting 2 drives for
parity striping) 6 X 300 (real) gbytes for almost 1.8 terrabytes of storage.
And this thing is WICKED fast, streaming read data at over 300 mbytes / sec.
AND it can lose two drives and still continue to work.  For someone in my
position, that is an incredible bargain.

Now if I could just figure out how to back it up economically.  ;-)

John W. Colby
Colby Consulting
www.ColbyConsulting.com

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