Any suggestions for an efficient backup system?
10 Jul 2013, 11:00 am
ScrewyWabbit wrote:
Online backup is not practical if the amount of data that needs backing up is large relative to the available bandwidth - and that's even before you get to storage costs.
Local backup, where the backup media is physically located in the same place as the computer, is much more practical. Get some sort of RAID controller - at worst you can use low-level RAID which automatically just mirrors one drive to the other - more elaborate RAID schemes exist where you have 4 or five hard drives in a RAID array and the data is automatically backed up across the drives such that if any one drive fails, all of your data remains intact - of course, with these schemes, the total disk space that you purchase is greater than the amount of disk space you can actually use (if you've got one drive mirroring the other, for instance, your usuable space is only half of what you paid for). Of course, the disadvantage to local backup is that while your data may survive the failure of any one disk, it won't survive some sort of disaster that destroys an entire location - so at the end of the day its a risk/reward/cost calculation and compromise.
Local backup, where the backup media is physically located in the same place as the computer, is much more practical. Get some sort of RAID controller - at worst you can use low-level RAID which automatically just mirrors one drive to the other - more elaborate RAID schemes exist where you have 4 or five hard drives in a RAID array and the data is automatically backed up across the drives such that if any one drive fails, all of your data remains intact - of course, with these schemes, the total disk space that you purchase is greater than the amount of disk space you can actually use (if you've got one drive mirroring the other, for instance, your usuable space is only half of what you paid for). Of course, the disadvantage to local backup is that while your data may survive the failure of any one disk, it won't survive some sort of disaster that destroys an entire location - so at the end of the day its a risk/reward/cost calculation and compromise.
I second this idea. You can also get a NAS backup unit and you can configure you OS to backup to a share on the network. Windows 7 and above natively support this feature.
10 Jul 2013, 1:44 pm
eric76 wrote:
ruveyn wrote:
The only fie safe backups are offsite backups. Perhaps something like Carbonite (tm).
I will only recommend on-line backups as a secondary backup and then only if the person/company has a good deal of bandwidth or if the amount to be backed up is fairly small.
For most individual users and small companies, there is a much better alternative.
Back up what you must back up to CDs or DVDs and store them in a safety deposit box well away from the computer. For people with PCs, there are some quite decent backup packages that are remarkably inexpensive. I haven't kept up with what is available these days, but I used to recommend Backup My PC for windows machines regularly.
With Backup My PC, you could put a CD or DVD in the machine and have it do a backup of what has changed during the off hours. Then once a week, do a complete backup of everything that you need backed up. Depending on how much data you have, you might just need to change disks once a week.
Of course, you don't want to waste time and space backing up the operating system. Just back up what needs to be backed up.
Although I greatly prefer Unix and Linux, I have yet to see a great hands-off backup for these.
I have put things on CDs and DVDs but they just don't have enough space. Then I moved to flashdrives and ultimately a couple of those terabyte drives. Now I have my irreplaceable files (photos, home movies etc.) on both flash drives and a terabyte drive at home in a fire safe and also flash drives and a terabyte drive in a safe deposit box a few miles from my home. That's a lot of redundancy but I don't want to lose those baby pictures in case of a house fire or natural disaster.
I looked at storing things in the cloud and to some extent do. Kodak/Shutterfly lets you store an awful lot of photos on their server (wherever that is). But for financial documents I feel safer having the flash drives and terabyte drive in the safe deposit box as well as also in the home fire safe.
10 Jul 2013, 3:00 pm
0bey1sh1n0b1 wrote:
eric76 wrote:
monsterland wrote:
I don't really consider external HDD to be "backup" because in case the ceiling caves in or there's a fire, both your backup and original will be gone.
Exactly. Not only that, the external drives seem to be less likely to last as long as an internal drive because they tend to take more abuse and because they generally don't have much in the way of cooling.I know one woman with quite a following on the internet who was using an external hard drive for a backup. When it failed, she contacted the manufacturer and asked for help getting her data off the drive. Their response was to tell her she was stupid for using an external drive as a backup (not quite those words, but same thing).
Not sure why you agree? Data centers have backup tapes in the same rooms as the servers that they've backed up. Yes worse case scenario is the room caves in and both the original and backup are gone but REALLY how many roofs have caved in on you? Backups are for the event that a hardware fails beyond the point of recovery.
Especially tornadoes. A number of years ago, one of the biggest tornadoes in history didn't miss the town by much.
The only bank in town is a block away from the office. The odds are that if a tornado strikes us, it will also strike the bank.
As far as keeping backup tapes in the same room as the server, yes that is common. But it doesn't mean that all of the backup tapes are kept in the same room. The largest company I ever worked at kept a complete set of backup tapes offsite at a data storage facility about five miles from the building. Many large corporations keep copies of their backups far away from their facilities, sometimes even in salt mines.
And your claim that "Backups are for the event that a hardware fails beyond the point of recovery" is just completely wrong. Hardware failure is only one of the reasons to make backups. Backups are made to enable the company to stay in business should anything happen to the computers. Besides hardware failure and corruption of data, that includes fire, theft, explosions, hurricanes, tornadoes, as well as any other reason why there might be a problem.
If a business is not worth saving in the event of a local disaster, then by all means, keep all of your backups in the same building.
10 Jul 2013, 3:14 pm
ScrewyWabbit wrote:
Online backup is not practical if the amount of data that needs backing up is large relative to the available bandwidth - and that's even before you get to storage costs.
Local backup, where the backup media is physically located in the same place as the computer, is much more practical. Get some sort of RAID controller - at worst you can use low-level RAID which automatically just mirrors one drive to the other - more elaborate RAID schemes exist where you have 4 or five hard drives in a RAID array and the data is automatically backed up across the drives such that if any one drive fails, all of your data remains intact - of course, with these schemes, the total disk space that you purchase is greater than the amount of disk space you can actually use (if you've got one drive mirroring the other, for instance, your usuable space is only half of what you paid for). Of course, the disadvantage to local backup is that while your data may survive the failure of any one disk, it won't survive some sort of disaster that destroys an entire location - so at the end of the day its a risk/reward/cost calculation and compromise.
Local backup, where the backup media is physically located in the same place as the computer, is much more practical. Get some sort of RAID controller - at worst you can use low-level RAID which automatically just mirrors one drive to the other - more elaborate RAID schemes exist where you have 4 or five hard drives in a RAID array and the data is automatically backed up across the drives such that if any one drive fails, all of your data remains intact - of course, with these schemes, the total disk space that you purchase is greater than the amount of disk space you can actually use (if you've got one drive mirroring the other, for instance, your usuable space is only half of what you paid for). Of course, the disadvantage to local backup is that while your data may survive the failure of any one disk, it won't survive some sort of disaster that destroys an entire location - so at the end of the day its a risk/reward/cost calculation and compromise.
RAID is not a backup. It is strictly a measure for keeping data available.
Keep in mind that if the more drives you have in a RAID, the greater your chances of losing your data because of hardware failures resulting from multiple hard drive failures.
Furthermore, in any RAID scheme, what happens if you accidentally delete a file or corrupt it in some way? You have to go to restore it from backup. If you depend on RAID for your backup, then have fun recreating that file.
For what it's worth, I've seen a number of different individuals and small companies using RAID who didn't monitor the status of their disk drives and failed to discover that they had a drive failure until both drives failed and they lost all their data. Mirroring is strictly for amateurs.
For higher level RAID, there are reasons to use it, but you should be aware of what it does and what it does not do before you use it and plan accordingly.
10 Jul 2013, 3:19 pm
0bey1sh1n0b1 wrote:
monsterland wrote:
I don't really consider external HDD to be "backup" because in case the ceiling caves in or there's a fire, both your backup and original will be gone.
However for your specific issue, there's a Windows program called Synctoy v2.1 .
It is reliable, sturdy, and can run from commandline on a schedule. It can copy only new&changed files to your "backup".
However for your specific issue, there's a Windows program called Synctoy v2.1 .
It is reliable, sturdy, and can run from commandline on a schedule. It can copy only new&changed files to your "backup".
If you make a duplicate then it's a backup regardless if the duplicate is stored in the same location as the original.
If the data is at all important, then losing it can often mean that a company cannot survive the problem. Losing your data can cost you your business.
If you think that it is worth betting the existence of a business on not keeping off-site backups in order to save a couple of thousand dollars, then the business must be a pretty rotten business to start with.
10 Jul 2013, 6:32 pm
eric76 wrote:
0bey1sh1n0b1 wrote:
monsterland wrote:
I don't really consider external HDD to be "backup" because in case the ceiling caves in or there's a fire, both your backup and original will be gone.
However for your specific issue, there's a Windows program called Synctoy v2.1 .
It is reliable, sturdy, and can run from commandline on a schedule. It can copy only new&changed files to your "backup".
However for your specific issue, there's a Windows program called Synctoy v2.1 .
It is reliable, sturdy, and can run from commandline on a schedule. It can copy only new&changed files to your "backup".
If you make a duplicate then it's a backup regardless if the duplicate is stored in the same location as the original.
If the data is at all important, then losing it can often mean that a company cannot survive the problem. Losing your data can cost you your business.
If you think that it is worth betting the existence of a business on not keeping off-site backups in order to save a couple of thousand dollars, then the business must be a pretty rotten business to start with.
Then I've worked for a lot of bad businesses. Again we go back to the literal work "backup" and whether it be local or offsite it is STILL a "backup". It's better than none at all. Problem with off site backups is it cost a lot of bandwidth and slows businesses down. They would have to purchase a bigger pipe and most companies don't like doing that. Onsite backups are easier. Now if we are talking about an integral structure that isn't being backed up constantly like local DC. Then yes you would see multiple servers replicating database information for redundancy and failover. For cost purposes there are times when it is better to do local backup and there are times to do remote backup.
10 Jul 2013, 6:40 pm
0bey1sh1n0b1 wrote:
eric76 wrote:
0bey1sh1n0b1 wrote:
monsterland wrote:
I don't really consider external HDD to be "backup" because in case the ceiling caves in or there's a fire, both your backup and original will be gone.
However for your specific issue, there's a Windows program called Synctoy v2.1 .
It is reliable, sturdy, and can run from commandline on a schedule. It can copy only new&changed files to your "backup".
However for your specific issue, there's a Windows program called Synctoy v2.1 .
It is reliable, sturdy, and can run from commandline on a schedule. It can copy only new&changed files to your "backup".
If you make a duplicate then it's a backup regardless if the duplicate is stored in the same location as the original.
If the data is at all important, then losing it can often mean that a company cannot survive the problem. Losing your data can cost you your business.
If you think that it is worth betting the existence of a business on not keeping off-site backups in order to save a couple of thousand dollars, then the business must be a pretty rotten business to start with.
Then I've worked for a lot of bad businesses. Again we go back to the literal work "backup" and whether it be local or offsite it is STILL a "backup". It's better than none at all. Problem with off site backups is it cost a lot of bandwidth and slows businesses down. They would have to purchase a bigger pipe and most companies don't like doing that. Onsite backups are easier. Now if we are talking about an integral structure that isn't being backed up constantly like local DC. Then yes you would see multiple servers replicating database information for redundancy and failover. For cost purposes there are times when it is better to do local backup and there are times to do remote backup.
Storing copies of your backup offsite is really quite simple. You go to a bank, preferably several miles away, and rent a safety deposit box. Then about once every week or two, you take a copy of your backup to the safety deposit box and store it there. If your offices are destroyed, then when you get new office space somewhere and new computers, you go to the bank and use the backups in your safety deposit box to keep your business running.
But you are absolutely right that online/remote backups are not good.
10 Jul 2013, 7:10 pm
eric76 wrote:
0bey1sh1n0b1 wrote:
eric76 wrote:
0bey1sh1n0b1 wrote:
monsterland wrote:
I don't really consider external HDD to be "backup" because in case the ceiling caves in or there's a fire, both your backup and original will be gone.
However for your specific issue, there's a Windows program called Synctoy v2.1 .
It is reliable, sturdy, and can run from commandline on a schedule. It can copy only new&changed files to your "backup".
However for your specific issue, there's a Windows program called Synctoy v2.1 .
It is reliable, sturdy, and can run from commandline on a schedule. It can copy only new&changed files to your "backup".
If you make a duplicate then it's a backup regardless if the duplicate is stored in the same location as the original.
If the data is at all important, then losing it can often mean that a company cannot survive the problem. Losing your data can cost you your business.
If you think that it is worth betting the existence of a business on not keeping off-site backups in order to save a couple of thousand dollars, then the business must be a pretty rotten business to start with.
Then I've worked for a lot of bad businesses. Again we go back to the literal work "backup" and whether it be local or offsite it is STILL a "backup". It's better than none at all. Problem with off site backups is it cost a lot of bandwidth and slows businesses down. They would have to purchase a bigger pipe and most companies don't like doing that. Onsite backups are easier. Now if we are talking about an integral structure that isn't being backed up constantly like local DC. Then yes you would see multiple servers replicating database information for redundancy and failover. For cost purposes there are times when it is better to do local backup and there are times to do remote backup.
Storing copies of your backup offsite is really quite simple. You go to a bank, preferably several miles away, and rent a safety deposit box. Then about once every week or two, you take a copy of your backup to the safety deposit box and store it there. If your offices are destroyed, then when you get new office space somewhere and new computers, you go to the bank and use the backups in your safety deposit box to keep your business running.
But you are absolutely right that online/remote backups are not good.
Yes that is the cheaper solution sneakernet your backup. Banks have Dropbox solutions as well for secure data storage. Again if you business depends on a wan connection to conduct business but at the same time your information is absolutely important that you need to back it up daily then KNOW that your bandwidth may be taxed if you have a small pipe. This could affect important applications that require a remote database because if network is slow your apps may timeout due to inconsistant connections. I know with me outlook drives me up the wall when network is slow. It's a cost trade off that businesses have to think about and businesses ARE cheap. Most of them.
11 Jul 2013, 10:11 am
eric76 wrote:
RAID is not a backup. It is strictly a measure for keeping data available.
Keep in mind that if the more drives you have in a RAID, the greater your chances of losing your data because of hardware failures resulting from multiple hard drive failures.
Furthermore, in any RAID scheme, what happens if you accidentally delete a file or corrupt it in some way? You have to go to restore it from backup. If you depend on RAID for your backup, then have fun recreating that file.
For what it's worth, I've seen a number of different individuals and small companies using RAID who didn't monitor the status of their disk drives and failed to discover that they had a drive failure until both drives failed and they lost all their data. Mirroring is strictly for amateurs.
For higher level RAID, there are reasons to use it, but you should be aware of what it does and what it does not do before you use it and plan accordingly.
Keep in mind that if the more drives you have in a RAID, the greater your chances of losing your data because of hardware failures resulting from multiple hard drive failures.
Furthermore, in any RAID scheme, what happens if you accidentally delete a file or corrupt it in some way? You have to go to restore it from backup. If you depend on RAID for your backup, then have fun recreating that file.
For what it's worth, I've seen a number of different individuals and small companies using RAID who didn't monitor the status of their disk drives and failed to discover that they had a drive failure until both drives failed and they lost all their data. Mirroring is strictly for amateurs.
For higher level RAID, there are reasons to use it, but you should be aware of what it does and what it does not do before you use it and plan accordingly.
Ok, mostly fair points. RAID will save you if you have a hard drive failure - of course it also entails a greater chance of a hard drive failure since you need more hard drives when you use RAID. And, yes, it will not save you if you delete / overwrite a file or the data gets corrupted in some other way.
So the best solution depends on exactly what you want / need to protect yourself from - hard drive failure, some sort of destructive event / natural disaster, or just being careless with your files / data, how much latency you can tolerate between the time data / files are created / changed and when they are backed up - and how much you are willing to spend do to it. Large companies often ship their backup media offsite to a 3rd party storage facility - but that's an expense that most home users are unlikely to be able or willing to pay.
11 Jul 2013, 12:57 pm
ScrewyWabbit wrote:
Ok, mostly fair points. RAID will save you if you have a hard drive failure - of course it also entails a greater chance of a hard drive failure since you need more hard drives when you use RAID. And, yes, it will not save you if you delete / overwrite a file or the data gets corrupted in some other way.
Can you clarify what is meant by that?
If you mean the odds of failure is higher because with more drives there are more chances for one of them to suffer a failure, I don't think that should matter. The redundancy is a protection against one or more drives failing. If somehow the use of more than one drive in a RAID configuration inflicts strain on every drive that increases the odds of failure, I'd like to know how that happens.
It's just like people who say not to use HDD optimizing software (moves files and defrags based on frequency of access/modification) because it will increase the odds of HDD failure. I've NEVER had that happened, and since you only need to do it maybe every 3 months (depends on what's fragmenting your file system), I believe the benefits greatly outweigh the risk.
11 Jul 2013, 1:35 pm
zer0netgain wrote:
ScrewyWabbit wrote:
Ok, mostly fair points. RAID will save you if you have a hard drive failure - of course it also entails a greater chance of a hard drive failure since you need more hard drives when you use RAID. And, yes, it will not save you if you delete / overwrite a file or the data gets corrupted in some other way.
Can you clarify what is meant by that?
If you mean the odds of failure is higher because with more drives there are more chances for one of them to suffer a failure, I don't think that should matter. The redundancy is a protection against one or more drives failing. If somehow the use of more than one drive in a RAID configuration inflicts strain on every drive that increases the odds of failure, I'd like to know how that happens.
It's just like people who say not to use HDD optimizing software (moves files and defrags based on frequency of access/modification) because it will increase the odds of HDD failure. I've NEVER had that happened, and since you only need to do it maybe every 3 months (depends on what's fragmenting your file system), I believe the benefits greatly outweigh the risk.
Never say never. One of the biggest problems with hard drive and even CD/DVD rom drives is that constant use of moving components significantly degrades the life of a drive. I mean hell I did a mass backup on several 100 DVD spindles and now my DVD drive can barely read much less write. Hard drives generate a LOT of heat and the more you have the worse it gets. If you do not have proper ventilation of the drive in a RAID configuration you risk loosing your drives. Most PC cases were not designed for mass amounts of hard drives and don't have good ventilation.
11 Jul 2013, 1:40 pm
zer0netgain wrote:
ScrewyWabbit wrote:
Ok, mostly fair points. RAID will save you if you have a hard drive failure - of course it also entails a greater chance of a hard drive failure since you need more hard drives when you use RAID. And, yes, it will not save you if you delete / overwrite a file or the data gets corrupted in some other way.
Can you clarify what is meant by that?
If you mean the odds of failure is higher because with more drives there are more chances for one of them to suffer a failure, I don't think that should matter. The redundancy is a protection against one or more drives failing. If somehow the use of more than one drive in a RAID configuration inflicts strain on every drive that increases the odds of failure, I'd like to know how that happens.
It's just like people who say not to use HDD optimizing software (moves files and defrags based on frequency of access/modification) because it will increase the odds of HDD failure. I've NEVER had that happened, and since you only need to do it maybe every 3 months (depends on what's fragmenting your file system), I believe the benefits greatly outweigh the risk.
The more disk drives you have, the greater the probability that one will fail. There is a very real chance that two will fail. In fact, if the drives come from the same batch and one drive fails early because of some manufacturing defect, the odds are higher that the others in the batch will fail early as well.
And like I said, if you accidentally delete or mangle a file, RAID won't help at all. Over the last 33 years of experience, the primary reason for going to a backup wasn't because of bad hardware but to restore files that had been mangled one way or another.
For example, at one company where I used to work, the accounting department started to run their year end closing and it failed miserably. It turned out that some files that were necessary for year end closing were missing completely. We had to go back to the backup tapes from about four months previous to that to find a copy of those files. We had no idea why the files were no longer there, but with the backups, it was easy to proceed. If we didn't have the backups, it would probably have taken the work of several people for at least a month to recreate them.
11 Jul 2013, 2:16 pm
0bey1sh1n0b1 wrote:
Never say never. One of the biggest problems with hard drive and even CD/DVD rom drives is that constant use of moving components significantly degrades the life of a drive. I mean hell I did a mass backup on several 100 DVD spindles and now my DVD drive can barely read much less write. Hard drives generate a LOT of heat and the more you have the worse it gets. If you do not have proper ventilation of the drive in a RAID configuration you risk loosing your drives. Most PC cases were not designed for mass amounts of hard drives and don't have good ventilation.
Every once in a while, I get a really perverse idea. One of my most perverse was the idea of building my own computers without any kind of a case. Instead of building them into a case, my idea was to attach the mother boards, disk drives, power supplies, ..., to the walls and ceiling of my office. My office would become the computer case. Each computer would be grouped together on the wall, but there could be overlap between adjacent computers.
Ventilation shouldn't be a problem.
Another idea was to use an old telephone system cabinet. This is a big cabinet for a telephone system that had been installed a large, regional bank about 30 years ago. It was something like 6 feet tall and 7 feet wide. The front of the cabinet had three doors -- a big door on the left, a big door on the right, and a small door in the center. The cabinet is built with different dimensions than a normal computer cabinet. My idea there was to get some thin sheets of metal on which to fasten the mother boards and the other components and mount those inside the telephone case. Using that method, I could have put ten to twenty computers quite easily in that cabinet. The question was what to do with the center part which was only about a foot and a half wide. I decided that what I needed to do was to build a shatterproof plexiglass case in the middle and keep rattlesnakes in it. I ended up getting a standard sized computer cabinet and gave the telephone system cabinet away.
11 Jul 2013, 2:38 pm
eric76 wrote:
It does matter.
The more disk drives you have, the greater the probability that one will fail. There is a very real chance that two will fail. In fact, if the drives come from the same batch and one drive fails early because of some manufacturing defect, the odds are higher that the others in the batch will fail early as well.
The more disk drives you have, the greater the probability that one will fail. There is a very real chance that two will fail. In fact, if the drives come from the same batch and one drive fails early because of some manufacturing defect, the odds are higher that the others in the batch will fail early as well.
Okay, but that's a mathematical issue. Be it one drive or 11, the odds of any ONE drive failing remains the same. More just means each drive might have the same odds of failing, but the odds of one of several drives failing increases with more drives in the pool of probability.
0bey1sh1n0b1 wrote:
Never say never. One of the biggest problems with hard drive and even CD/DVD rom drives is that constant use of moving components significantly degrades the life of a drive. I mean hell I did a mass backup on several 100 DVD spindles and now my DVD drive can barely read much less write. Hard drives generate a LOT of heat and the more you have the worse it gets. If you do not have proper ventilation of the drive in a RAID configuration you risk loosing your drives. Most PC cases were not designed for mass amounts of hard drives and don't have good ventilation.
Well, that's a given with any hardware. I'm sure HDDs and optical drives are rated for X hours of use before the odds of failure start to creep up towards 100%. However, presuming no inherent defect and NORMAL use, you should get a lot of life out of any hardware component. I've seen the issue with buggy optical drives that see a lot of use.
Still, the idea of "don't do that because it WILL make your device fail" is rather laughable. Optimize a HDD every day/week or maybe every month and you are adding considerable extra work and cutting life off its "clock." Do it every 3, 6 or 12 months, and I'd contend you are well-within the expected usage the drive is designed for.
Indeed, consider this....typical defrag programs do nothing but recover free space into one location. Most do not reconstruct files into one location to avoid jumping back and forth to read the whole file. So, high percentage of fragmentation = considerable increase in HDD operation to do basic file access (and it slows response time to do stuff on the HDD). Optimizing every now and then improves overall HDD performance and reduces strain on the HDD's daily operation.
11 Jul 2013, 9:16 pm
eric76 wrote:
0bey1sh1n0b1 wrote:
Never say never. One of the biggest problems with hard drive and even CD/DVD rom drives is that constant use of moving components significantly degrades the life of a drive. I mean hell I did a mass backup on several 100 DVD spindles and now my DVD drive can barely read much less write. Hard drives generate a LOT of heat and the more you have the worse it gets. If you do not have proper ventilation of the drive in a RAID configuration you risk loosing your drives. Most PC cases were not designed for mass amounts of hard drives and don't have good ventilation.
Every once in a while, I get a really perverse idea. One of my most perverse was the idea of building my own computers without any kind of a case. Instead of building them into a case, my idea was to attach the mother boards, disk drives, power supplies, ..., to the walls and ceiling of my office. My office would become the computer case. Each computer would be grouped together on the wall, but there could be overlap between adjacent computers.
Ventilation shouldn't be a problem.
Another idea was to use an old telephone system cabinet. This is a big cabinet for a telephone system that had been installed a large, regional bank about 30 years ago. It was something like 6 feet tall and 7 feet wide. The front of the cabinet had three doors -- a big door on the left, a big door on the right, and a small door in the center. The cabinet is built with different dimensions than a normal computer cabinet. My idea there was to get some thin sheets of metal on which to fasten the mother boards and the other components and mount those inside the telephone case. Using that method, I could have put ten to twenty computers quite easily in that cabinet. The question was what to do with the center part which was only about a foot and a half wide. I decided that what I needed to do was to build a shatterproof plexiglass case in the middle and keep rattlesnakes in it. I ended up getting a standard sized computer cabinet and gave the telephone system cabinet away.
Hate to tell you this but Darren Kitchen from Hak5 beat you to that idea. He built a server and hung it on the wall. Believe me ventilation is a factor. I had this NAS that was poorly ventilated and now the hard drives are cooked literally. The circuits are brown and burnt. Gaming cases are designed to be RAID ready because the load time is much faster on RAID drives than non-RAID. So they have a hard drive cage where you can store four to five hard drives and has a huge fan in front of the hard drives.
11 Jul 2013, 11:04 pm
0bey1sh1n0b1 wrote:
eric76 wrote:
0bey1sh1n0b1 wrote:
Never say never. One of the biggest problems with hard drive and even CD/DVD rom drives is that constant use of moving components significantly degrades the life of a drive. I mean hell I did a mass backup on several 100 DVD spindles and now my DVD drive can barely read much less write. Hard drives generate a LOT of heat and the more you have the worse it gets. If you do not have proper ventilation of the drive in a RAID configuration you risk loosing your drives. Most PC cases were not designed for mass amounts of hard drives and don't have good ventilation.
Every once in a while, I get a really perverse idea. One of my most perverse was the idea of building my own computers without any kind of a case. Instead of building them into a case, my idea was to attach the mother boards, disk drives, power supplies, ..., to the walls and ceiling of my office. My office would become the computer case. Each computer would be grouped together on the wall, but there could be overlap between adjacent computers.
Ventilation shouldn't be a problem.
Another idea was to use an old telephone system cabinet. This is a big cabinet for a telephone system that had been installed a large, regional bank about 30 years ago. It was something like 6 feet tall and 7 feet wide. The front of the cabinet had three doors -- a big door on the left, a big door on the right, and a small door in the center. The cabinet is built with different dimensions than a normal computer cabinet. My idea there was to get some thin sheets of metal on which to fasten the mother boards and the other components and mount those inside the telephone case. Using that method, I could have put ten to twenty computers quite easily in that cabinet. The question was what to do with the center part which was only about a foot and a half wide. I decided that what I needed to do was to build a shatterproof plexiglass case in the middle and keep rattlesnakes in it. I ended up getting a standard sized computer cabinet and gave the telephone system cabinet away.
Hate to tell you this but Darren Kitchen from Hak5 beat you to that idea. He built a server and hung it on the wall. Believe me ventilation is a factor. I had this NAS that was poorly ventilated and now the hard drives are cooked literally. The circuits are brown and burnt. Gaming cases are designed to be RAID ready because the load time is much faster on RAID drives than non-RAID. So they have a hard drive cage where you can store four to five hard drives and has a huge fan in front of the hard drives.
Hmmm. I just looked for pictures and found one of a computer in a picture frame for hanging on the wall. I can see where ventilation would be a factor in that.
If you want to boot faster, forget RAID and go with a Solid State Disk.
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