[Talk] Reality check...

[Enno Davids]

| I had a thought & wanted a Reality Check on it.
| It seems too obvious not to have been thought of before, so what's the
| catch??

The only real catch is that IDE busses only support 2 devices (happily most
systems have more than 1 of them these days...) and some of the open source
OSes handle what they believe to be fixed drives disappearring and being
replaced by other (occasionally dissimilar) drives poorly.

Other than those caveats I know a couple of people doing this already. Often
its just with a second internal drive and a nightly rsync to keep them close
to each other. Its not quite 'offsite backup" but it is regular, reliable and
low cost both in $$$ and in pain & heartache.

| IDEA:
| The cost of DLT & LTO tape media is ~$3/Gb.
| The cost of commodity IDE drives is ~$1-2/Gb.  IDE enclosures with
| either Firewire or USB are cheap & readily available.

You left out that the DLT and LTO drives themselves aren't exactly cheap.
Last time I was offered a 'special price' on an LTO it was $6k and that was
when I first mused that I could buy 30x 80Gb IDE drives for the same money.
Now where to plug them in...

| What am I missing here??  Anyone heard of this being done?


Cheers,

Enno.