Re: Was AMD Phenom based hardware - backing up issues

On Fri, 3 Dec 2010 04:21:49 UTC, "Dariusz Piatkowski"
<dariusz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
....snip...

Well...speaking of USB attached drives...how 'workable' are these solutions in
our OS2 environment? I ask b/c with my current hardware getting a simple SD card
reader used to be a problem. Eventually with the right combination of USB
drivers I was ok, but even then the transfer rate was just miserable.

What can one expect these days?

I am using a 1 TB Samsung Story Station USB disk formatted JFS, for
backup. I also use RSYNC to do the backup. Most of the time, the
backup, of my whole system (somewhere near 150 GB total) takes less
than 10 minutes. Sometimes it takes up to 30 minutes, if I have been
using the virtual systems (4 or 5 very large files). The speeed is not
because the USB is fast, it is because RSYNC is very efficient at
doing the job. Of course, the first pass, when it has to copy
everything, takes quite a while.

I also have another disk, with an eSata interface on it (as well as
USB). It is a 640 GB disk, in a NexStar enclosure. ESata, of course,
runs at SATA speeds, but does require a reboot to connect/disconnect
the eSata interface. I haven't used it for the backup, but I would
expect it to do the job in less than 5 minutes.

There is also the option of using a NAS drive. I don't have any
experience with those, but I expect that the speed falls somewhere
between the USB and eSata options (network speeds).

You do, of course, need the latest USB support, and a USB 2.0
controller, to make this work (the latest Dani driver does eSata, with
no problem). The Samsung drive does work with USB 1.1, but you won't
want to use it that way. You also need JFS for any kind of speed, and
support for large disks. FAT32 is very slow (but works far more
reliably, and faster, if you REM the CACHEF32.EXE line in CONFIG.SYS,
and don't use the EA support feature). If you don't use EAs, you
should use some sort of backup program (ZIP) to save the files (that
also speeds it up because compressed files are also smaller files,
most of the time). NTFS is not usable, because it doesn't really
support writing (it might work, at your own risk). HPFS, and
especially FAT16, are almost useless on large disks.

IMO, an external hard disk (USB, NAS, eSata, or even another network
connected system) is the only reasonable way to do a backup any more.
Real hard disks are far more reliable (not to mention faster) than
CDs, or DVDs, which are my second choice (Tape would be my second last
choice, followed by floppies). Hard disks are, of course, somewhat
delicate, but you can use a disk, designed for a laptop, in an
enclosure, if you want to transport them regularly.

Hope this helps...
--
From the eComStation of Doug Bissett
dougb007 at telus dot net
(Please make the obvious changes, to e-mail me)

.

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