[lug] [Slightly OT] File Management?

[Lee Woodworth]

Rob Nagler wrote:

[...snip...]

> The primary problem with SATA is the controllers depend on caching and
> clean file systems (did I mention this already?).  When you want a
> reliable backup, you can't afford to resend all the data, all the
> time, unless you have unlimited bandwidth.  I might use SATA for what
> I will call "tape" (explained later), but I wouldn't use it for our
> main backups.

It sounds like you have looked at rsync and decided it isn't useful
in your situation. Can you say why?

When you say "SATA backup solutions" do you mean appliance type
of units or something like Lefthand Networks iScsi units?

You mentioned system board and controller failures for your own built
systems. Were there issues with the SATA disk drives?

Did you measure soft raid performance (say mirroring) for the virtual-tape
archiving systems to see if it was good enough? I have done file copies on a
vanilla white box using soft mirroring via the MB SATA v1 ports. Copied about
120GB w/ average file size of 50M. Write rates were 25MB/s to each disk
in the mirror (no caching). This is an old athlon XP 2200 CPU, with vanilla
drives (no NCQ), so I would expect with a new MB with PCI express, decent
SATA controller cards (non-raid), and higher performance drives (with real
NCQ) the transfer rates would be higher even across multiple mirror sets.