Comments on: Portable hard drive https://habitablezone.com/2011/06/10/portable-hard-drive/ Sat, 11 Apr 2026 02:11:35 -0700 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: Robert https://habitablezone.com/2011/06/10/portable-hard-drive/#comment-2217 Robert Wed, 15 Jun 2011 16:41:17 +0000 http://habitablezone.com/?p=1560#comment-2217 <p>The only practical way to backup up a modern monster hard drive is another monster hard drive.</p> That's why I like RAID 1 mirror sets: The system performs the backup in real time, and your data always exists on two drives. I can relate to being nervous about making a mirror. When I rebuilt the server recently, I had all my existing data on one single terabyte drive, and none of the documentation I could find could reassure me that the data wouldn't be erased in the course of adding another blank drive to create the mirror set. So I dithered a couple of weeks, operating on just the single drive, until I finally decided to just say F-it, and bought two more $70 terabyte drives to create a mirror set from scratch, <i>then</i> I copied over all the data from the precious single drive. Cheap mass storage is the gift that just keeps on giving. I'm an instinctive data hoarder, I guess, and always backup important data six ways from Sunday. For the university, I set up this gigantic network of backup computers, two in the Amazon cloud, three more at three different external hosting companies, and my office machines, all backing up each other, some data sets as often as once per hour. The HabitableZone database and several others are on an hourly schedule. My most critical data gets backed up literally six ways, and seven times more often than just Sunday. I can relate. The only practical way to backup up a modern monster hard drive is another monster hard drive.

That’s why I like RAID 1 mirror sets: The system performs the backup in real time, and your data always exists on two drives.

I can relate to being nervous about making a mirror. When I rebuilt the server recently, I had all my existing data on one single terabyte drive, and none of the documentation I could find could reassure me that the data wouldn’t be erased in the course of adding another blank drive to create the mirror set. So I dithered a couple of weeks, operating on just the single drive, until I finally decided to just say F-it, and bought two more $70 terabyte drives to create a mirror set from scratch, then I copied over all the data from the precious single drive. Cheap mass storage is the gift that just keeps on giving.

I’m an instinctive data hoarder, I guess, and always backup important data six ways from Sunday. For the university, I set up this gigantic network of backup computers, two in the Amazon cloud, three more at three different external hosting companies, and my office machines, all backing up each other, some data sets as often as once per hour. The HabitableZone database and several others are on an hourly schedule. My most critical data gets backed up literally six ways, and seven times more often than just Sunday.

I can relate.

]]> By: TB https://habitablezone.com/2011/06/10/portable-hard-drive/#comment-2157 TB Tue, 14 Jun 2011 17:10:43 +0000 http://habitablezone.com/?p=1560#comment-2157 I'd love to plug another drive into my system and make it a full mirror of my C-drive (system/applications) but I'm nervous about screwing with it. Short of using up vast numbers of DVDs "ghosting" it, I don't have a really good way to back that drive up in case of a mechanical drive failure. My D-drive (data) is backed up seven ways from Sunday. I’d love to plug another drive into my system and make it a full mirror of my C-drive (system/applications) but I’m nervous about screwing with it. Short of using up vast numbers of DVDs “ghosting” it, I don’t have a really good way to back that drive up in case of a mechanical drive failure.

My D-drive (data) is backed up seven ways from Sunday.

]]> By: Robert https://habitablezone.com/2011/06/10/portable-hard-drive/#comment-2154 Robert Tue, 14 Jun 2011 16:45:50 +0000 http://habitablezone.com/?p=1560#comment-2154 Looks like it might be a drum memory rather than a disk, but the difference is mainly topological (and interesting for the parallels with the development of audio recording, starting with a cylindrical recording medium and evolving into a disk). Interesting too that progress was slow compared to our modern expectations. It took another dozen years for 20 megabyte drives, about a quarter of the size of the monster in the photo (=16X improvement in information density). By the early 70s I worked on those things in a refurbishment depot, and 20 megs was still state of the art, but the effort at that time was to miniaturize the things down to lunch box size. A month ago I built a new server (a real one, not a virtual cloud server), and thought nothing of slapping in three terabyte drives, at $70 each, and combining two in a mirror for backup. A terabyte's what, about 200,000 times the capacity of the thing in the photo? And I brought it home in a car, no cargo plane required. Looks like it might be a drum memory rather than a disk, but the difference is mainly topological (and interesting for the parallels with the development of audio recording, starting with a cylindrical recording medium and evolving into a disk).

Interesting too that progress was slow compared to our modern expectations. It took another dozen years for 20 megabyte drives, about a quarter of the size of the monster in the photo (=16X improvement in information density). By the early 70s I worked on those things in a refurbishment depot, and 20 megs was still state of the art, but the effort at that time was to miniaturize the things down to lunch box size.

A month ago I built a new server (a real one, not a virtual cloud server), and thought nothing of slapping in three terabyte drives, at $70 each, and combining two in a mirror for backup. A terabyte’s what, about 200,000 times the capacity of the thing in the photo? And I brought it home in a car, no cargo plane required.

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