sick of tapes - good disk backup solution for small/medium businesses?

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K

Kremlar

Golden Member
Oct 10, 1999
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I've had it with tapes and am trying to come up with a good disk-based backup solution for servers (running AD, Exchange, etc.).

We currently use Symantec Backup Exec with mostly DLT-V4 drives, previously using Sony AIT. Experiencing too many early tape drive failures, bad tapes, bad tapes ruining drives (!), etc.

What are others doing for disk-based backup solutions for small/medium size businesses? I don't mind sticking with Backup Exec. External USB drives plugged in via USB cable can work, but seems a bit hack to me.

I'm envisioning some kind of caddy containing 2.5" or 3.5" SATA drives (to cover the electronics and make them a bit more durable) that inserts into either an external USB/eSATA base unit or internal drive bay.

Something like this on NewEgg, but ideally I'd want a caddy for the drive that will protect the electronics as we often times need the ability to take backups off-site.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-038-_-Product

We need the ability to rotate between 5+ hard drives, plus take at least one backup off-site.

What are others doing?
 
RebateMonger

RebateMonger

Elite Member
Dec 24, 2005
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I've been using these $60 internal Granite Digital SATA hot-swap housings for several years at several clients with zero issues. I use Silicon Image PCI or PCI-E disk controllers with an internal SATA connector and a SATA cable to connect the internal housing to the server. The housing has temperature and fan speed audible alarms.

http://www.granitedigital.com/satahot-swapinternalenclosure1.aspx

The hotswap trays are about $30 each:

http://www.granitedigital.com/satahot-swaplcdtrays.aspx

Their $10 padded case fits the removeable drive trays perfectly:

http://www.granitedigital.com/paddedcarryingcase.aspx

I imagine you can continue to use your Symantec software.
 
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T

tcsenter

Lifer
Sep 7, 2001
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RebateMonger,

You think those housings could be modded to accept between two and four 2.5" SATA notebook drives?

I would love to find a good 5.25" hot-swap housing/bay like those but supports two to four 2.5" notebook SATA drives installed in each housing. An internal embedded CPU with RAID support would be great but I could get along with hooking the drives up to a cheaper RAID card.
 
RebateMonger

RebateMonger

Elite Member
Dec 24, 2005
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tcsenter said:
You think those housings could be modded to accept between two and four 2.5" SATA notebook drives?
Click to expand...
I don't think so. The trays are metal and are built to perfectly fit a standard 3.5" SATA disk. You screw the disk in place with the power and data PCB tabs sticking out the rear of the metal tray. The housing has connectors to match the disk's PCB power and data tabs and then has outside connectors for a SATA data cable and a standard 4-pin molex power cable.
 
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tcsenter

Lifer
Sep 7, 2001
18,934
567
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Guess I'll try to build/fashion my own from a cheap housing. Sorry for the thread hijack, though it could be relevant.
 
K

Kremlar

Golden Member
Oct 10, 1999
1,426
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I've been using these $60 internal Granite Digital SATA hot-swap housings for several years at several clients with zero issues. I use Silicon Image PCI or PCI-E disk controllers with an internal SATA connector and a SATA cable to connect the internal housing to the server. The housing has temperature and fan speed audible alarms.
Click to expand...

Seems decent... but beige? How about black! Was hoping for something a bit more "finished" looking, but that might work.


i don't understand. you want to backup critical data on a 2.5" disk?
Click to expand...

Sure, why not? I'll take it over magnetic tape at this point. I'm not talking long-term archiving, I'm talking rotating nightly backups.
 
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tcsenter

Lifer
Sep 7, 2001
18,934
567
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Kremlar said:
Seems decent... but beige? How about black! Was hoping for something a bit more "finished" looking, but that might work.
Click to expand...
Paint is cheap. Rough up the surface with some emery cloth, wipe it down with rubbing (isopropyl) alcohol, let dry and spray paint it.
 
A

alyarb

Platinum Member
Jan 25, 2009
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Kremlar said:
Seems decent... but beige? How about black! Was hoping for something a bit more "finished" looking, but that might work.




Sure, why not? I'll take it over magnetic tape at this point. I'm not talking long-term archiving, I'm talking rotating nightly backups.
Click to expand...

still, the capacity per reliability per dollar isn't there with 2.5" drives. any decent SATA hotswap gear is going to be built for 3.5" disks. samsung F2EG's are $99 for god's sake. how much storage space do you need anyway?
 
K

Kremlar

Golden Member
Oct 10, 1999
1,426
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81
As I said in my original post, 2.5" or 3.5" is fine. But 2.5" is more portable, so I'm inclined to go that route if a decent hot swap cage is available. 500GB - 1TB should be sufficient.
 
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alyarb

Platinum Member
Jan 25, 2009
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3 inch is more reliable, faster, and cheaper than 2 inch. what about that is so difficult?
 
RebateMonger

RebateMonger

Elite Member
Dec 24, 2005
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Kremlar said:
I'm liking this perhaps:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...Tpk=MB123SK-1B
Click to expand...
I haven't looked at that one. I see a small rear fan. The Granite Digital stuff has a large horizontal fan on the bottom of the metal tray that stays very quiet and has been very reliable over the past four years. I've only had one fan go bad out of a couple of dozen trays. Replacement horizontal fans are $8-$10.

I asked Granite Digital about the white color once and they had no plans to offer a black face. I haven't had any complaints from clients about the color, but these are in servers, not desktops.
 
K

Kremlar

Golden Member
Oct 10, 1999
1,426
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I emailed them about black, and they said no. Seems strange?? Everything is black nowadays.
 
RebateMonger

RebateMonger

Elite Member
Dec 24, 2005
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Kremlar said:
These look like a possibility as well, bigger horizontal fan like you prefer, but probably not as high quality:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817993031
Click to expand...
I believe those are all-plastic housings. Unfortunately, those make good heat insulators. I "melted" a Maxtor 250 GB hard drive once in a plastic tray running an all-day file transfer.It was too hot to touch and stopped working.

My clients' backups may take twelve hours of continuous running each day and I'd be worried about overheating the drive. Also, there's no temperature or fan speed sensor alarms.
 
M

MerlinRML

Senior member
Sep 9, 2005
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aE0n said:
We are using RDX drives. The cartridges have laptop type drives in them with shock absorbers and are very durable. They do cost more than what you're looking at and only go up to 500GB, but they are very reliable.

http://www.provantage.com/tandberg-d...x~7TANM02X.htm
Click to expand...

I like these.

Dell sells the same thing but calls it the RD1000. It's a 2.5" drive in a plastic "cartridge" shell, and there's a USB or internal slot to insert them. The RD1000 drive is relatively cheap, but the cartridges get spendy.

As long as your backup app supports them, they work very well.
 
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Aeridyne

Senior member
Nov 25, 2004
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I too am looking for pretty much exactly the same solution, I've been researching for a while now. We have a lot of 2U servers though, so I don't even have a 3.5" bay at my disposal. Thusly I've been trying to find something that can hook up via Esata, that is a mobile rack, like an external mobile rack basically, being for a business it could be for more than one drive if that is the only way I could find it. (port multiplication could be tricky)

Like Kremlar I want something that fully encloses the drive (not trayless, or sled type, needs to be fully enclosed metal jacket), and I want to use 3.5" drives, I want to buy the drives once, likely I will use Seagate ES drives or something of that nature, more robust than even a standard 3.5" drive made for enterprise use.

Need to be hot swappable too, seems like some of these mobile racks have 3 key positions, on/locked, power off, and power off/unlock (I could be wrong, I'm guessing, all I know is they have 3 positions and facilitate hot swap by being able to power the drive down before you pull it.)

I've seen this enclosure on Mac Gurus - http://www.macgurus.com/productpages/sata/sataguide_1.php
Which looks pretty cool, you could add whatever mobile rack you wanted to it basically. A single bay one would be ideal as I really only need to hook up one drive, like a tape drive replacement, only using disk, like Kremlar said.

Aside from the issue of not being able to find a good suitable external enclosure to put a mobile rack or two in, power them nicely, and run esata cables to the backs of my servers, there is the issue of not being able to find particularly good mobile racks in and of itself. I've looked at every icy dock offering, thinking maybe they would be good quality like the aluminum external enclosure I have at home, the MB6655US or something like that, one of the first to come out, regular drive sled, works great but doesn't protect the drive at all. Well, apparently not, as the reviews are terrible on most of those products, so I went looking around, I see reviews and feedback from people using Kingwins and other such, and a lot of them seem to be toasting drives and sometimes other hardware.

I'd like to share what I've found thus far with you guys and see if we can build up to figuring something good out here, Kremlar, if you haven't already figured out a solution, I'm looking for exactly the same thing so I understand what it is you want, and yeah, it's not easy to piece together, haha. And I agree that USB seems hack, I want an Esata solution with a good controller card, good trays, and good drives for a real build your own enterprise level solution.

So here are the sites I've looked at thus far for ideas or possible hardware;
1. (noted above already) http://www.macgurus.com/productpages/sata/sataguide_1.php
2. (the granite mobile rack) http://www.granitedigital.com/satahot-swapinternalenclosure1.aspx
3. (utility for hot swapping) http://safelyremove.com/
4. (seen lots of people mention, personally I can't find squat on here helpful for exactly what I want) http://www.istarusa.com/
5. Startech's website
6. Addonics website
7. (this here looked pretty sweet, thought about trying it out for my home system as I have 2 5.25" bays open and want to be able to have 2 backup drives in and live and one redundant backup drive to clone each of those, all in removable fully enclosed hot swappable trays) http://www.directron.com/sntsac2131b.html

a zillion other google results I've yet to plow through...
 
K

Kremlar

Golden Member
Oct 10, 1999
1,426
3
81
Thanks for the detailed reply! Glad to hear I'm not the only one looking for something like this.

I think I'm going to order both of the cages I mentioned above and see how they are first-hand.

Aeridyne - please post back your findings, and I will do so as well!

Those RDX drives look interesting as well, and I will check them out furhter - but I'd prefer something more generic that won't become a discontinued product (like would likely happen with Iomega REV, etc..).
 
A

Aeridyne

Senior member
Nov 25, 2004
242
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71
Kremlar said:
Thanks for the detailed reply! Glad to hear I'm not the only one looking for something like this.

I think I'm going to order both of the cages I mentioned above and see how they are first-hand.

Aeridyne - please post back your findings, and I will do so as well!

Those RDX drives look interesting as well, and I will check them out furhter - but I'd prefer something more generic that won't become a discontinued product (like would likely happen with Iomega REV, etc..).
Click to expand...

Yeah, I've been working on this for a solid year now off and on, coming into it with pretty much no idea what the heck was out there, only knew exactly what my requirements were, which tied in closely with the backup software I wanted to use, I knew from the start though that I wanted fully removable and hot swappable drives, in fully enclosed and protected drive cages, eject button was a luxury I guess I'll have to live without, that would have been too perfect I guess.

So on that Granite site which Rebate Monger pointed out, there are various other cool options there, there is a single external 5.25" enclosure that a mobile rack can be housed in, freaking beautiful I tell you. Also, that MacGurus enclosure that they have, I tracked down the manufacturer of that enclosure, the 4 drive fixed bay one, and lo and behold, jackpot again, they have nearly the same lineup as Granite Digital, now I have two options for essentially almost exactly what I wanted to put together! I wrote up a quick word doc and send it off to the boss and boss boss, still waiting to hear back from them, unfortunately I'm not guessing that there will be any fanfare or glory for my achievement sadly though... But we shall see, if I can integrate a better backup software and imaging, maybe some De-dupe in there and really tie up everything into a nice tight package, maybe I can still get some recognition out of it, sigh. But anyway, I digress, this is about the brass tacks hardware and software, not my job, lol.

I agree with your notion on the RDX drive too Kremlar, it is a good product, and has an eject button, i have two of them here that I've been playing with, the cost of cartridges is ludicrous though, and it is USB, which, isn't an enterprise worthy interface imho.

Now I still want to find a good solution for a 2x 5.25" bay 3 drive Sata mobile rack fully enclosed drive cages for my home system, but again I digress.

I'll update again soon, possibly tomorrow with what develops. And thanks for the warm welcome on my long addition to your thread Kremlar, never know how such a long post will be received sometimes, it was almost spooky today when I saw this thread at the top of the list when I was coming here to post the exact same thing myself today. :)

*edit: Oh, and I should definitely give some kudos to Rebate Monger, that link to the Granite site was the spark that led me to find all the hardware I've been searching for months on end!*
 
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