Windows Server

Rgarcia · Guest

Hi,

I am trying to find out if Hot Swappable Hard Drives are a good backup
solution. Is it possible to use Mobile racks and just pull out the hard
drive?? Does it need some kind of adapter?? I've found this website that
seems to have mobile racks and hot swap ide/scsi adapters...
http://www.plinkusa.net/buyrackacc.htm ... but my question is what kind of
hardware do I need for this kind of solution??

Allen M · Guest

I'm very curious as to how you plan on making this work. How are you going
to write to these hot swapable drives and how often if at all possible are
you going to back up? You cannot write to the hard drives if they are part
of an array. By "mobile racks" I'm assuming you mean some kind of external
SCSI HDD bay? IMHO I think you're putting your time and efforts in the wrong
place. Have you considered a tape drive device? If $$$ is an issue then
using hard drives will be way too expensive. If your data is minimal you may
want to consider copying to a CD. I'm going to monitor this as I do find it
to be very interesting and am curious as to what the MVP's are going to
suggest. Good luck.

"Rgarcia" <Rgarcia@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:619A35CA-D69A-4C92-8EF4-AA5BE496E50B@microsoft.com...

Rgarcia · Guest

Thanks for writing...

This is what I am planning to do:
I will have a SBS 2003 with RAID 5 holding all of the good stuff (OS, users
folders, mail, etc) and also, I would like to have a single IDE drive for
backup purposes. This IDE drive will not be part of the RAID 5 configuration.
It will be sitting by itself... I would do a DAILY backup to this drive and
replace it with a new drive the next morning so I can take one off-site.

The reason why I included a link showing those parts is because I don't know
if I need to have some kind of adapter for this single IDE drive in order to
make it hot swappable. I know I can just unlock the mobile rack and pull the
drive out. However, I believe this may cause data corruption (or more bad
stuff) since the ability to "just pull the drive" does not make it hot
swappable.

I've read some people is implementing something like this as a backup
solution. Some of them use usb drives since they support Hot swap.

We have about 50 GB of data so CDs are not an option.

This is for a small business so money might be a problem. Also, we have many
unused (and identical) hard drives... therefore, hard drives would not be an
expensive solution for us.

Allen M · Guest

OK I'm getting a clearer picture. First of all using the term "hot swapable"
is in appropriate in your case. If it is IDE drive you don't need to do much
other than pulling to drive. There is no other configuration you need to
set. The IDE drive will show up in your Disk Management as just being
another physical drive. Also consider that you will not get a clean full
backup because your simply going to just do an xcopy and it will not be able
to copy any open and most system files as they will always be in use. If
data is all your going to backup it may be ok but you will still have an
open file issue. I would definitely reconsider this option based on the
premises of what you will not be able to copy. Does this backup include MS
Exchange? Good luck.

"Rgarcia" <Rgarcia@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:19DDC382-4146-4DE2-8C86-A35442F846B4@microsoft.com...

daniel · Guest

This subject never fails to incite me.

I cannot stress enough that however convenient and cheap a solution it may
seem to be I can only say that IMO this view is flawed for many reasons,
some of which I will point out.

Hard drive caddies are not made for cheapskate backup solutions, they are
designed for data availability and data security. Regular SCSI or IDE SATA
whatever hard drives in metal or plastic trays are not meant to be hauled
around from pillar to post.

Even if you try a 'shockproof' set of drives and it will be a set, it will
cost you the same as an entry level backup drive probably more.

You can create far more comprehensive backup strategies knowing you have a
cheap and reliable medium on which to keep your data.

As an additional strategy for backup I might be inclined to suggest a file
server containing Ghost, V2i (something else now) or whatever images for a
quick restore. but that's about it.

"Rgarcia" <Rgarcia@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:619A35CA-D69A-4C92-8EF4-AA5BE496E50B@microsoft.com...

Rgarcia · Guest

That was quick...

I think I have to do something else than just pulling out the drive... maybe
I forgot to mention something important..." I want to be able to pull out the
drive while the server is running"

I tried this before (just pulling it out ) and it seems like the data gets
corrupted... I read somewhere in the microsoft support website that the
channel's cache has to be disable to avoid data corruption... I did it and it
seems to work "sometimes" (device manager->hard drive properties-->check box
somewhere??) I'll look for the link....

have you tried this before?? are you able to just pull out and replace the
drive while the computer is running with no data corruption??

sorry if this is getting silly...

"Allen M" wrote:

Allen M · Guest

Yes you did forget to mention that. In that case I have no answer. Seriuosly
though you definitely want to go with another option. I know you're a smaill
company but you should really look into purchasing a backup media even if it
is a cheap internal DAT tape device. Or do what Daniel suggests and get
another server to store your ghost image. But then again how are you going
to back that server up?

"Rgarcia" <Rgarcia@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:CCD07ECF-9645-4BF0-9830-3E64348D6F7F@microsoft.com...

Eric · Guest

If you're pulling an IDE drive out of a 'mobile' drive tray that isn't
hot-swappable, you will eventually encounter a fried drive or a fried ide
controller or a crashed server. I tried the same thing many years ago and
that's what happened to me. Don't ever 'hot-swap' a mobile drive carriage
unless it specifically states that it is capable of hot-swapping, especially
if it is IDE. If you want to do this, go buy two or three external USB2.0
or Firewire drive enclosures and mount your extra drives in them. Total
cost? About $100 to $125 for three of them. Then you'll have a way to
'hot-swap' them via USB/Firewire. In the backup world, nothing is
guaranteed. If the business owner cares about his 'baby' then one backup
method isn't enough. A combination of tape, RAID, external drives, and/or
remote backups gets you much closer to nirvana and you have to be dilligent.
One missed backup, unverified backups or never even performing a mock
recovery and one disaster without recovery will put you out of business
within two years, if not immediately.

Good luck.

Eric

"Rgarcia" <Rgarcia@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:CCD07ECF-9645-4BF0-9830-3E64348D6F7F@microsoft.com...

Rgarcia · Guest

Thanks guys...

Can't blame me for trying huh? I will look for a better solution... I
appreciate your comments...

"daniel" wrote:

Dave Satchell · Guest

This is one option I proposed to a client of mine. He never did anything
and still doesn't have a backup solution. I have implemented a similar
strategy with another client and he is very happy.

++++
A conservative estimate of 1GB per user and 8GB for the server with
10users yields 18GB of data for a backup. Even though a tape drive may be
listed as 20/40 gig of space, the last value (40gig) is a very optimistic
estimate based on very good compression. A more realistic value would be
about halfway between the two values for the high-end. So 20/30GB doesn't
leave a lot of room when you are buying hardware that you don't want to
have to replace any time soon just because you out-grow it.

With the following SATA Hard-Drive backup option you have to swap the
drives and take it offsite according to whatever schedule you determine.
This assumes that you also install two drives in a mirroring
configuration (SATA raid-1 or redundancy) with a third drive as a hot
standby. You could also elect to eliminate the raid system and just go
with the backup configuration and stay with the single drive currently in
the "file server". I would make all of the drives the same because of
the following scenario (based on 160GB drives - you could use smaller or
larger drives) :
1. Lets assume that your running SATA raid-1 mirroring with one standby
drive (3 drives) as described above. (1 SATA raid drive cage $200, 1 SATA
raid controller $275, 3 SATA drives @ 160GB each $360)
2. Now add 4 more SATA drives as backup drives. Any one drive would be
able to backup the entire system/data drive. This way if you forget one
drive in your other car or at home, use one drive as the monthly backup,
and even if you have one drive in the server fail, then you can replace
the failed drive with the backup drive with the oldest data on it and you
still have one drive to do your current backup to. ( 4 drives @ 160GB
each $480, 4 removable SATA drive trays $250)
3. At a later time you decide to increase capacity. Put in a new SATA
RAID-5 controller card. Load it up with your four backup drives from #2,
use the SATA RAID-1 standby drive as the end of month backup. Copy the
mirrored drives to the RAID-5 array and you've gone from 160GB Raid-1 to
480GB Raid-5. Take the older RAID-1 drives, make both of them your
standby drives. Now go out and buy whatever you want for your new backup
system. This will only work if you also have used #1.

This has a total cost of $1,515 for the full package which allows for
work to continue in the office since even if a drive in the raid-1 array
were to fail the system would continue to operate.

+++
On Windows 2003 based systems (SBS2003) you have the ability to click on
an icon to remove removeable hardware. This applies to the SATA drive
used for the backup so that you don't corrupt anything.

Go out and price anything that is comparible in speed and GB capability
and you will pay $3000 or more. Then you still have to buy the tapes at
$50-$125 each.

If your really concerned about treating the drives cautiosly, get a
padded case to carry them in.

Also, as for the USB external drives, you had better get USB-2 or
firewire. My current client is backing up 28gig in 45-58minutes (850-
580meg/minute) and that it with the verify turned on.

Using USBv1 external drive as a stop-gap until I installed my package was
taking 14+ hours for a backup of the same 28gig. USBv2 will be a lot
faster but I know for a fact that it can't compare with SATA, it just
wasn't designed as a HD interface. Look on the internet for comparisons
of the ACTUAL time it takes a USBv2 external drive to transfer 5+ gig of
data. Don't be fooled by burst rates. When I was looking I found that
USBv2 would be about 25% slower than SATA plus you have to unplug the USB
cable and the power cord every time. The USB case is about the same size
as the hot-swap SATA tray.

Last thing, SATA is designed from the ground up to be hot-swap, IDE is
not (even though some PATA cards are).

Dave.

	Windows Server Forum Index -> Small Business Server 2003	All times are GMT
Page 1 of 1