[mdlug] External Hard Drive as Backup

[Aaron Kulkis]

Dan Pritts wrote:
>> Does firewire offer higher speeds than usb
> 
> Firewire does most of the work for you, but USB requires your CPU
> to do most of the heavy lifting.  This along with some architectural
> details which i don't know much about makes Firewire faster.  
> 
> whether you care or not is another question - for occasional use
> running backups, USB is probably plenty fast.
> 
> i didn't check the methodology of the two tests below but they are
> interesting.  The thing that's really notable is the speed of esata
> vs. usb or firewire on the second link.   If you really want fast,
> go esata.
> 
> Firewire 800 would be better but esata is cheaper and potentially
> faster.
> 
>   http://www.usb-ware.com/firewire-vs-usb.htm
>     Read Test:
>     * 5000 files (300 MB total) FireWire was 33% faster than USB 2.0
>     * 160 files (650MB total) FireWire was 70% faster than USB 2.0
> 
>     Write Test:
>     * 5000 files (300 MB total) FireWire was 16% faster than USB 2.0
>     * 160 files (650MB total) FireWire was 48% faster than USB 2.0
> 
> 
>   http://www.everythingusb.com/seagate_freeagent_pro_750gb_hard_drive_12613.html
>     Speed: 30-33MB/s (USB 2.0), 31-37MB/s (FireWire 400), 49-57MB/s (eSATA)
> 
> 
>> or can I open my options a little by dispensing with
>> firewire? Should I consider paying a little more and getting a NAS with
>> ethernet?
> 
> A NAS system will almost certainly be a lot slower than any of the
> other options.  
> 
> You might say, hey, 1G ethernet is 125MB/sec, that should be plenty
> fast enough that it shouldn't be the bottleneck.  You'd be right -
> the bottleneck is the file sharing protocols.  Your PC likely doesn't
> have a good enough ethernet card to get full line rate, either.
> "server" ethernet cards like the intel e1000 really are better.
> 
> that said, nas is a lot more flexible.
> 
> i bet it would be hard to make it be bootable even if it has
> some sort of USB mode.  
> 
> 
>>     Once I get one, how should I format it so I would be able to sync
>> two notebooks with /root, /boot, /usr, /swap, /var, /tmp, /opt
>> and /home partitions. Just two ext3 partitions, one for each notebook?
> 
> I'd do one big filesystem.  
> Consider this:
> 
>   http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/
> 
>> It would also be nice to be able to boot directly from the
>> 'backup' drive via usb or other, must I do something special for that to
>> happen?
> 
> if you just do a mirror of your boot drive, you probably will be OK
> but make sure your kernel and/or initrd has all the USB-storage support
> you will need to boot from usb.  You would have to install a bootloader
> on the external drive too.  (grub or lilo)
> 
> random hint - if you do buy a firewire drive, get one that also has
> USB so you can use it on some firewire-less computer in the future
> if you want it.  says the guy who decided to save a few bucks by
> dropping the USB support and wishes he didn't.

USB 2.x cards cost less than $20