>> DDS only goes up to a maximum of 80 GB. My server holds 103 GB. 
> 
> Sorry. Something looks wrong in these numbers. 103 GB? You don't mean 
> 103T?  I can't even go to the store and buy a hard drive that small, 
> unless it's a laptop hard drive. You could mirror the whole drive every 
> day of the week for about $500.

Yes, 103 GB. That's 4 drives holding 36 GB each in a RAID-5 array. 
Hence, effectively 3 x 36 GB. (Windoze reports it as 103 GB. I guess the 
drives aren't exactly 36.0 GB or something.)

Given that we have 103 GB and it's about 20% full so far, what in the 
name of God would we need 103,000 GB for? And last time I checked, SCSI 
drives are [still] damn expensive. Sure, you could probably get a 300 GB 


I guess we *could* back up to a hard drive. But I'm not really that keen 
on the idea. We would have to shut the server down to connect the drive, 
start it back up again, format the drive, copy all the data, somehow 
verify the data, shut the server down, disconnect the drive, put it 
somewhere safe, and start up the server again. Every single night. No 
thanks...

I don't have any hard evidence to back this up, but isn't power-on the 
most common time for a HD to fail? (Rather like lightbulbs.) Wouldn't 
the constant cycling tend to wear them down? Hmm, mind you, I guess it's 
no worse than all the other PCs here that get switched on each morning...

The other small problem is that 30 harddrives presumably take up 
slightly more space than 30 DDS tapes. ;-)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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