I have a DLT tape drive and do a full system backup every night. It works
well, but the problem is that it takes a good 8 hours to back up the system
every night. I really use it in case something gets corrupted or deleted (in
addition to if the hard drive goes down). I would like, however, to not rely
on the tape for hard drive failure.
Wait a second. Something's not right. Are you performing a full
backup every night? Is the tape shoeshining? Is this like DLT2000
old? An old DLT 7000 or 8000 should do a complete backup & verify of
your 40GB system in around 2 hours. You should fix this issue first
before "rocking the boat" & significantly altering the server you seem
otherwise happy with.
It takes so long to do a restore of one or two files, if I had to do a full
restore, it would definitely be more time then I can afford to be down.
right lets fix your tape problem first. You're still going to need
tape even with the raid & even with caching the backups to a nas or
extra hdd. The increased throughput from raid may help somewhat the
backups, but you should understand & fix this problem first.
I agree. I think a small RAID system would strike a good balance between
cost and redundancy/ability to recover.
Also, ATA? I know IDE and SCSI, but not ATA.
maybe not if this is a DIY type project & he is willing to scrounge a
little. 2x new 74gig scsi drives which are solid but maybe not the
newest 15k flavor & a new external enclosure & amphenol & madison
cabling care of ebay or a discount place like pc-pitstop.com using SW
raid or say a Mylex U160 controller. This would be external scsi raid
nearly 80GB without breaking the bank. The DLT likely cost much more
when new. I'm so unimpressed with the external sata & FW offerings
I've seen that even scrounging seems more attractive to me.
That said, if I choose to go an internal RAID, what hardware do I need
(besides some drives of course).
All you NEED is the requisite drives & cabling (either scsi or ata).
The SBS OS does some SW raid. It would be better to get a good
quality raid controller & hotswap backplane. Yes you can just attach
2 more scsi drives to the scsi controller & make a raid 1 volume no
prob. You don't want the dlt on the same channel as a raid array on a
raid controller but it should be OK on a small setup with a single
channel generic hba.
You can continue to get by with a souped up desktop with ata but I
really think the SQL & Exchange for 20+ users could benefit from low
latency server scsi drives esp as the data grows. A good server nic
might help also. A solid server foundation might make you happier in
the long run if running raid & multiple mission critical roles. The
questions you really need to answer for yourself is how happy are you
with getting by & how maxxed out is this server presently?
1 word about raid 3 & 5. raid 3 is seen as obsolete & requires,
generally, an older controller or a rare specialty external system.
raid 5 has a lot of engineering & performance hurdles a manufacturer
must jump through. If budget is an issue your data will be safer with
raid 1, 3, or 10. The parity levels (3,5,6,50, etc) require a fast
processor & lots of ram (at least 64MB) and a battery backup doesn't
hurt. The mirror levels (1,10, 0+1) really fly on a lot less and can
withstand more disk failures. While 1, 3, or 5 can withstand 1
failure, 10 or 0+1 can withstand loss of 50% of the disks (as long as
they are the right ones). with 10 there is a higher likelihood that
it will actually withstand more failures than 0+1. Also the mirrored
levels are more likely to perform an extra write verification on the
fly whereas you can pretty much forget about this with most raid 5.
From a pure space perspective Raid 5 is still an option for your
server, but it will max it out from the get go and as this isn't a
real server platform, you may have problems cramming every bay & slot
and expecting so much of the machine.
