[SLL] External Drives

[John Locke]

We've been using the Dataport V units from cru-dataport.com for several
years, with good success. They're down in Vancouver, WA, and make good
quality stuff. We've been buying through a reseller in Portland, Amicus
Data.

It's an external removable drive enclosure that works with any 3.5" IDE
drive. We tend to get the HotDock carrier, which has both USB2.0 and
Firewire connectors, and an extra rack, and then go down to Hard Drives
NW to pick up some Seagate drives. The hotdock is in the $150 range, and
the carriers another $45 or so... but they're much sturdier than the
cheap enclosures we've also found at Frys.

On Linux, we've found the one catch is you need to actually power down
the enclosure, or unplug the USB cable, for the kernel to recognize when
you've changed a drive. We have set up udev to create a single mount
point for the drive, adding the UUID for new drives to the rules so our
backup script can just mount using the mount point when it runs, and
unmount when it's done.

They also have a hardware encryption system as an option... you get what
looks like a USB thumb drive only with a Firewire connector, containing
a 3DES key. You plug it into the face of the drive and turn it on, and
the hardware encrypts/decrypts the drive contents on the fly. You can
then pull the key and store it separately. When the power is
disconnected, the key is gone, so no access to the drive until you plug
the dongle in again...

It's a great system for physical backups that need to be secured...

... only available for IDE, though...
http://www.cru-dataport.com/htmldocs/products/encryption/HotDockSecure.html

Cheers,
John

Bill Campbell wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 02, 2008, Shawn W. wrote:
>   
>> On Jan 2, 2008, at 7:33 AM, Eric Kahklen wrote:
>>
>>     
>>> We are looking to buy an external drive to back up data off our  
>>> Linux server.  At home I have a Western Digital and Acomdata that  
>>> seem to work well.  I've heard terrible things about the Maxtor One  
>>> Touch.  What models have people had good luck with?
>>>       
>> I have a One Touch hooked up to a Mac (Via firewire, a much better  
>> option than USB for external storage imo). My only complaint with it  
>> is that the idle timeout before it spins down to save power is too  
>> short (And the spin-up time the next time you access a file on it is  
>> long), and there doesn't seem to be a way to change it. Oh, and it  
>> came formatted with a ntfs partition, but wiping that and putting  
>> hpfs on it was trivial.
>>     
>
> I always figured the Firewire would be better than USB on Linux systems,
> largely because it is an IEEE standard, and has been used extensively by
> Apple for years.  Unfortunately I've had problems with the FireWire drives
> on Linux, often losing connection to the drives which only a reboot would
> fix.  The same drives have not given problems when connected via USB.
>
> One of the most cost-effective drives today seems to be the LaCie
> Quadra 500GB unit which has Firewire 400, Firewire 800, USB2, and
> SATA in a singla package.  They're about $190 at newegg.com.
>
> Bill
> --
> INTERNET:   bill at celestial.com  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
> URL: http://www.celestial.com/  PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way
> FAX:            (206) 232-9186  Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820; (206) 236-1676
>
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>