[geeks] Big Blue Smoke

[Eric Dittman]

> > I run parts of my business on IDE - but I also have redundant machines
> > and load balancers, as well as NAS.  If/when one of my servers dies,
> > nobody notices - and I can bring up a spare server in about 10 minutes
> > to take it's place.  Of course, these are *appliances*, and fast disk
> > I/O isn't necessary.
> 
> I'm not longer thrilled with IDE. I had a drive die and latch the bus, so
> drive #3 could not be reached. So much for fault tolerant filesystems.

The biggest problem I'm seeing with IDE lately is that people
are buying these huge IDE drives for home use without any way
of backing them up.  The cost of backing up has not kept pace
with the cost of storage in the home market.

You can buy an inexpensive DLT4000 on eBay right now, but the
tapes are still a little expensive (DLTIVs).  Telling someone
they need to spend $250 (drive) plus $60 (three DLTIV tapes,
if you're lucky), plus $50 for a SCSI card to back up their
$150 120GB IDE drive doesn't work.  They'd rather spend $300
for two drives, which does make more sense, if they can get
them mirrored or remember to actually copy the data to the
second drive.
-- 
Eric Dittman
dittman at dittman.net
Check out the DEC Enthusiasts Club at http://www.dittman.net/