SATA HDD >1TB

[Rob Nicholson]

We've just installed a rather nice JBOD external enclosure with 4 x 1TB hard
disks for use as backup-to-disk with Backup Exec. Whilst we've got oodles of
backup storage for now (~two months back), we may need a lot more soon as
we're using a lot more space for video recently.

Anyone know what the road map is looking like for >1TB disks?

Cheers, Rob.

 

[Rod Speed]

We've just installed a rather nice JBOD external enclosure with 4 x 1TB hard disks for use as backup-to-disk with
Backup Exec. Whilst we've got oodles of backup storage for now (~two months back), we may need a lot more soon as
we're using a lot more space for video recently.

Anyone know what the road map is looking like for >1TB disks?

Hard drives will get bigger, just like hard drives always do.

 

[Odie Ferrous]

We've just installed a rather nice JBOD external enclosure with 4 x 1TB hard
disks for use as backup-to-disk with Backup Exec. Whilst we've got oodles of
backup storage for now (~two months back), we may need a lot more soon as
we're using a lot more space for video recently.

Anyone know what the road map is looking like for >1TB disks?

Cheers, Rob.

JBOD and BACKUP don't get along. Unless you don't value your data.


Duncan

 

[Rob Nicholson]

JBOD and BACKUP don't get along. Unless you don't value your data.

Why not? It's a recommended solution by Symantec with Backup Exec...

It goes onto tape as well BTW and then taken off-site

Rob.

 

[Rod Speed]

(Sorry for the late response)

I think we can assume that it will be possible for the capacity of disk
drives to increase by another factor of 16 or so in 6 years or less.

However, the home market might be more driven by the
need to do a complete disk image in a fixed about of time
Nope.

and perhaps smaller devices that use less power.
Unlikely.

Looking at the 1tB disks that are around now, .1gB/second seems
to be about the maximum read or write speed. So it takes about
3 hours to read such a disk in order to make an image backup.

With the right kinds of file system a reliable backup can be
made that just looks at incremental changes, but for the
typical home user using NTFS the only way to get a reliable
backup of the system disk is to image the entire drive.

Oh bullshit.

Therefore, it would take about 3 hours to make a
useful backup, 6 hours if a verify operation were done.

Or with drives getting cheaper and cheaper, you will see a lot
more use of RAID etc for backup against hardware failure etc
and the time to do an image backup is completely irrelevant.

Since most people already don't do backups I think that
many home users already use drives that are too big.

Irrelevant to what is perfectly possible if you have enough of a clue to do backups.

Note that it is possible to stripe disks to speed up the backups
and compares. This allows for a 2 to 4 fold increase in partition
size while keeping the same backup and restore time.

And it makes a hell of a lot more sense to not do image backups with drives that big.

(Yes, many specialized applications work fine with incremental backups,
but for the typical home user the system disk should be fully backed up.

Doesnt have to be backed up using an image backup.

In fact, if you have more than one disk on your system, the system disk should be kept
small so that when the telephone support people as for diagnostics to be run on the
system disk it take 20 minutes for an 80gB disk, rather than 4 hours for a 1tB disk.)

Gets sillier by the minute.