Sorin Srbu wrote:

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-----Original Message----- From: centos-bounces@centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces@centos.org] On Behalf Of Benjamin Franz Sent: Thursday, January 14, 2010 2:12 PM To: CentOS mailing list Subject: Re: [CentOS] Backup server

If you have any budget at all, invest in bigger drives. 7200 RPM 1 TB RAID rated drives can be bought for $160 each. Desktop rated 5900 RPM 1.5 TB drives (which you can probably get away with in a dedicated backup server since you don't care a lot about speed and can tolerate long pauses for sector repair) can be bought for $110 each. Check Newegg.

I haven't got a budget really. Today I asked for a new group-printer today and the boss looked pained... 8-}

SATA disks fit into 'office supply' budgets.

I opted for the proven 500GB-sized disks and got more of those instead. I've had a handful of 750GB-drives die on me recently.

Go to the vendor's web site, enter their serial numbers and get an RMA for a free replacement. Every vendor has had bad batches.

Somehow it feels the technology isn't quite there yet for the bigger drive-sizes. Anybody remember the IBM Deskstars in the early 00's...?

They replace them too, within the warranty period. This is the reason you are making backups, remember. Things break.

Also, my experience is the more smaller disks you have, the faster they get. Less to write to each I guess.

That's true when the heads seek independently. With raid5 you lock onto the slowest of the set unless you have a very large number of drives.

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Second, to maximize 'depth' of backups you should use a 'Tower of Hanoi'-like backup system.

Good advice, thanks!

Backuppc will take care of that for you.