I understand that we can switch the power On and Off of the LaCie drive. We switch it off when we do not plan to use it. However, don't we have to STOP the drive before we switch it off? As you all know, it is virtually impossible to STOP it unless we reboot the machine and it is the first thing we...

Other than second-site replication how do people with multi-TB of data do disaster planning these days ? Do poeple just buy pairs of SAN/NAS boxes ? I'd want three, actually. Sh*t happens. I managed datacenters when disks went from 25MB to maybe 800MB and 9 track tapes were good enough for...

I have a home network consisting of two computers connected to a small router via 10/100 Mbps ethernet. I have 4 IDE hard disks, each 200GB or less. The operating systems are Windows XP SP1 and SP2, Windows 98, Linux Red Hat 9, and Linux Fedora Core 3. Now for the hard bit - what's the easiest way...

Storage Gurus, We have been using Netbackup for years, and have used it for archives. But our end users are not comfortable with this solution. Saving the bplist output is not an elegant solution for them either. They loose track of where their data was when it was archived and so are unable to...

After reading the "USB Mass Storage Class Bulk-Only Transport" specification, I got a concept about the transmission protocol between my desktop PC and some portable USB devices such as external HDD and external DVD-RW. Despite this, I have no idea about how my desktop can understand the content in...

I am exploring SAN options at the office and keep reading that EMC is the best. I am not doing FC, but am looking at a CX300i. How good is this product compared to the cheaper HP, Lefthand, and other options? Is their reputation worth the extra cost for maintenance, support, and quality?

My 2.8TB RAID 5 array is finally up and running. Here I'll discuss my initial intended specifications, what I actually ended up with, and associated commentary. Please...

We're looking to buy a SAN having previously used HP Proliant servers with internal storage. We're doing this primarly for the higher levels of resilience offered by SANs. Our last two servers were ML530s with space for 14 drives. We've been in the habit of keeping each ML530 in service for 3...

What disk manufacturers still have essentially end-to-end fabrication lines? Are there any companies we never hear the names of that make HDA assemblies for others? -- a d y k e s @ p a n i x . c o m Don't blame me. I voted for Gore. A Proud signature since 2001

I'm trying to figure out how many servers I can connect to a direct attached hard disk SCSI array. I've been told its only two - is this true? Cheers, Ken

Hi there, Does anyone have any real world figures of holw many times DLT IV (DLT 7000) media can be used ? Quantum say it can go past the heads 1,000,000 times but what is it really like ? I'm trying to find out at which point media should be junked and replaced with new, as we've been having...

Right now I have a 200 gig western digital as my main hard drive. It has an 8 mb buffer I think. And its IDE. The best I can find in my research is that the transfer rate for IDE is 16 Mbs. And that SATA is like 3 gigs a second. Is that right, or am I looking at the wrong things. And if this is so,...

Hello! One of the responsibilites in my new job is, to take care of the backup of our Solaris servers. We're using LTO 1 tapes to hold the backup. When I now had a look at the Netbackup software, I saw that some of our tapes are quite old (from 2003) and have been mounted up to 500 times.

I was using the Backup utility that comes with XP and is in the Systems Utilities folder. I installed Norton Ghost backup to try and the Windows backup utility is now not in the menu. I un-installed Ghost and the Windows backup utility is still not in the menu. How can I get the Windows Backup...

Hello, Do utilities exist to "scrub" for bad blocks/files/metadata on a Windows file system? More details: While managing my personal storage (anywhere from 10-20GB storage rignt now) and my associated backup drives, I'm finding that disk drives and/or file systems are having problems reading...

A SATA drive (Western Digital 2500SD) from a 3Ware 9500S array went offline and was replaced by a hot-spare. I pulled the "bad" drive and put it in a machine with a basic Promise SATA controller and booted up Western Digital's diagnostic program to test the drive. The DLGDIAG program reported...

How could I backup windows XP so that I could restore it to the exact settings I have in place without having to backup the entire drive? Thanks

Hello, are there some guidelines available how to calculate the capacity of a tape drive? (I understand that a large tape-capacity means fewer tape changes, lower administrative overhead, and fewer operator errors) Any tip is appreciated very much. Thank you!

Hi, I am a newbie into Storage. I have to setup Persistent Binding. I have a QLogic HBA and a HPEVA array. I am not aware which files in the HP-UX platform needs to be edited to enable PB, for example to configure emulex stuff there is lpf.conf (something of that sort). Can anyone help me this...

I'm seeing a lot of enclosures these days brag about eSATA compatibility, and I guess this translates as "External SATA". Is eSATA simply a standard for how to make the cabling and connectors for external connections more robust than the connectors used internally? If yes, how do you convert...