[Discuss] Possible backup scenarios for a 500GB drive

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2007-10-24 06:54-0700 pw wrote:

> Alan W. Irwin wrote:
>> 
>> That sounds like a good alternative suggestion as well.  Has anybody here
>> had practical experience with this option or the external USB drive option
>> discussed above?
>
> I have used all manner of USB and firewire drives with kernels
> from 2.4 to 2.6. They work fine as long as you are careful to
> mount and unmount properly, especially with earlier kernels.
>

Thanks, Peter, for that reply which stimulated some more questions and
comments.

In practice, is firewire (400Mbps) faster then USB 2.0 (480Mbps) on Linux?
According to http://www.cwol.com/firewire/firewire-vs-usb.htm firewire is
from 16 to 70 per cent faster than USB 2.0 depending on whether read or
write and on the mix of files that are being accessed.  The reason for this
higher practical speed is apparently because firewire is just a better
protocol for dealing with disks.  However, I take this speed comparison with
a grain of salt because it was most likely done on windows. It would
definitely be interesting to do some Linux speed comparisons between
firewire and USB 2.0 for the same drive.  Some of the external drives I saw
at atic.ca provided connections for both USB 2.0 and firewire interfaces.

Does anybody know if there are some good free tools to do disk benchmarking
on Linux?  I will want to measure the speed of my internal 500GB drive as
well as any external drives I might buy.

While looking up Linux and firewire before making this post, I found the
interesting reference at
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-fireboot.html?ca=dgr-lnxw42FireBoot.
This is a three-year-old article, and I am sure a lot of these details are
more automated now in Linux, but nevertheless it was nice to see the
details.

One issue brought up by the article was whether your BIOS would be able to
boot from firewire devices.  According to the manual for the ASUS P5K-V MB I
am buying, it does have a firewire capability, but there is no mention of
firewire devices in the Boot Device Priority menu that is printed with the
manual so booting from firewire may not be possible with this MB. (That
certainly still leaves the possibility of using a firewire-connected drive
strictly for backup without actually trying to boot from it.)

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of
Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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