SCSI vs IDE vs FIREWIRE/USB

[Bill Campbell]

On Fri, Dec 13, 2002 at 09:09:36PM -0500, Joel Hammer wrote:
>I find the 4 drive limitation of IDE machines quite bothersome. Is there
>some way, other than scsi, to overcome this limitation in the linux world?
>
>Is setting up a scsi system just a matter of installing a scsi adaptor
>and then plugging things in (along with the appropriate drivers)? Is it
>worth the extra cost?
>
>Are there easier/better alternatives like firewire/usb peripherals?

SCSI is probably the best bet if you're looking for high performance and
reliability.

We're doing some experimenting now though with FireWire for things like
large ftp sites where things change very infrequently, and access speed is
limited by our T1 to the Internet.  We're also looking at using external
120GB firewire drives for backups.  They're easy to hot-swap, cheap ($200US
for a Maxtor drive ane the external chassis), and fast enough for network
backups using rsync.  Assuming this works well, I plan to have at least two
of these drives, one of which is at an off-site co-location site (I'll make
the original backup locally, then ship the drive to the co-lo for rsync
updates).  This way we'll have a local copy for fast recovery in case a
machine goes down, and a remote copy in case of major disasters.

Right now I'm doing my first network backup from an SCO OpenServer box to a
Caldera 3.1.1 Workstation box with a 2.4.20 kernel, with the external
Maxtor drive.  I'm planning on getting a managed 10/100 ethernet switch
with two 10/100/1000 ports, and putting the backup server on the 1000 port
to see how things go when I have several machines backing up
simultaneously.

Bill
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