[Leica] Re: Advice needed

[jhnichols at lighttube.net (Jim Nichols)]

Brian,

Your backup scheme appeals to me.  I have two older hard drives, a WD Caviar 
WD300BB which is reported to use an ATA-100 interface, and a WD Caviar 102BA 
which is an IDE/ATA drive.  I know these are small, but they would help me 
with some specific needs.  Do you know if they will work with the Newer 
Technology interface kit?

Jim Nichols
Tullahoma, TN USA
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Brian Reid" <reid@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us>
To: "Leica Users Group" <lug@leica-users.org>
Sent: Saturday, February 21, 2009 12:32 PM
Subject: Re: [Leica] Re: Advice needed


>I recommend against using any RAID for archival storage.
>
> The reason for this is that RAID combines several disks into a single 
> logical volume, and the combining is done by proprietary electronics that 
> are not necessarily compatible with other brands of RAID or formats of 
> RAID.
>
> If you put images on, say, a RAID 5 array, the individual disks are not 
> readable without special software that you don't have. In order to read 
> data from a RAID 5, you need to have the same RAID controller that wrote 
> the data in the first place. Electronics are ephemeral. If the RAID 
> controller dies and you can't find a replacement, then it doesn't matter 
> how much redundancy you have on the disks themselves.
>
> RAID 5 is great for day-to-day storage of things. It's what I use to 
> protect myself against short-term loss of data, and it gives a nice 
> speedup, too. But when I make an archival copy, I just copy files to a 
> single hard drive, connected with one of those Newer Technologies cables 
> that Larry Z mentioned, which I format as NTFS and not as Mac OS (because 
> I figure that 50 years from now there is a higher probability that you'll 
> be able to read Microsoft-format disks than Apple-format disks).
>
>
>
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