On Tue, 28 Oct 2003, maarten van den Berg wrote: > One of the cheapest "backup" mediums right now are harddisks themselves > (weird, isn't it?) so it stands to reason some people try to build > something that is foolproof (at least against hardware failure) using > that, just disks. Ok, most folks would argue that hard disk failure is a byproduct of them being run continuously. Especially in the case of IDE disks, which are usually cheaper than their SCSI counterparts on a cost-per-MB ratio, but consequently have a much shorter MTBF. So here's my question - would it be possible to use a very large IDE disk in a system purely for backups, eg one of those new 300GB behemoths - but with one caveat - leave it "asleep". Ie. leave it "spun down", and only activate it once a day at backup time, run the backup, verify it, then unmount it, and put it to sleep in a cron job. Feasible? I know there's the appropriate commands to do it, but are they risky? If a drive's not mounted, but powered off, it should present no problems or lock up the OS, correct? > > PS: did I tell you about the importance of backups? ;) > > Yea. I think you did. ;-) Everyone's got a horror story.. :) and most people learn from it :) Luke. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
