After waiting far too long, I finally ordered an extra hard drive to stick in the Dell SC430. It’s a 320GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 from NewEgg:

europa ~ # hdparm -I /dev/sdb /dev/sdb: ATA device, with non-removable media Model Number: ST3320620AS Serial Number: 3QF0LFPW Firmware Revision: 3.AAE Standards: Supported: 7 6 5 4 Likely used: 7 Configuration: Logical max current cylinders 16383 16383 heads 16 16 sectors/track 63 63 -- CHS current addressable sectors: 16514064 LBA user addressable sectors: 268435455 LBA48 user addressable sectors: 625142448 device size with M = 1024*1024: 305245 MB device size with M = 1000*1000: 320072 MB (320 GB)

europa ~ # hdparm -Tt /dev/sdb /dev/sdb: Timing cached reads: ... 2057.87 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: ... 77.02 MB/sec

Now I can keep all of my media (e.g. mp3s, photos, videos) on that drive, and rsync it to the USB drive enclosure (250GB) that I picked up a while back. That should work as a decent backup system for at home.

I considered running RAID 1 in the server, as it would have been cake to set up. But I wanted a true backup, not just improved availability and hardware fault tolerance. Honestly, I don’t really care about recovery time or availability. However, I care an awful lot about not losing any data. So I’m pretty happy with this setup.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 26th, 2006 at 8:12 pm and is filed under Hardware, Life, Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.