real life application Re: [G4] EIDE and Ultra ATA RAID

[Steve Goldstein]

Thanks to EVERYBODY who contributed to this discussion.  I had been 
asked by a CPA friend of mine to help him purchase a new PC (his 
professional accounting applications work only on a PC).  Backing up 
client data is, of course, a huge concern.  He had been using a 
5+-year-old Compaq Presario (consumer model) with about a 20 GB HD 
and a Colorado Tape backup unit that has just ceased working, but 
which took him **three whole hours** to back up each day.  Gawd!  I 
shudder to think of the fragility of his system!  First thing I'm 
going to do is to back it up wo an external 2.5" FW drive that I 
happen to have lying around the house.

Anyway, we ordered a Dell Dimension 8400 with dual 160 GB SATA drives 
in Raid 1 configuration, for just the purposes mentioned in the 
subject discussions.  And the messages confirmed in my mind that I 
did the right thing in recommending Raid 1 to him--there will always 
be a hot backup, even if the controller card goes south.  In 
addition, I will outfit one of the 5.25" face plates on the Dell box 
with a removable HD rack, and we will get at least two 160 GB HDs 
(Samsungs are only about $80 each at newegg.com) with cassette 
carriers to fit it (about $35 plus $15 per carrier), so that he can 
do rotational/generational backups every night (that is, back up to 
removable drive A, take it home; back up to DH B the next day, take 
it home, then start the rotation all over again the next day).  The 
backups ought to take less than a half hour (he really has less than 
10 GB total on the drive, including all his system and applications, 
so we can actually clone it with Ghost) instead of more than three 
hours with the tape drives.

Thanks again, everybody!

--Steve