Net Disk

[Ted Martin]

Has anyone tried the Netdisk? Here's the company web site: http://www.ximeta.com/index.html

I found them at the local Best and also at TigerDirect they have an 80g for $150+/- that I was thinking about using to replace a file server on our network. We have three computers that we use for appraisals with ACI so our network traffic is pretty light. I was thinking that this might save some office space and electricity. The drive is twice the size of the one in our server which is an old PIII-450 with set up with a pair of RAID 40g drives that mirror each other.

 

[Tom Foster]

I got one and it works good.


What operating system are you using ???


Tom

 

[Ted Martin]

Win98SE, Win2k, WinXP

 

[Tom Foster]

OK,

I see you are using hardware RAID. What brand of RAID controller are you using?

Also are those mirrored drive IDE or SCSI. ??

I have set up many servers using mirroring and/or RAID 5, but I have not seen a controller that will accept a USB2 on the RAID controller itself.

I like the USB2 external drives and I wrote a backup script that will back up to 2 seperate drives at the same time.


Tom

 

[Ted Martin]

The controller is an Iwill, but it's an IDE in a PCI slot not a USB. I really wasn't looking for a USB drive I was interested in the NetDisk because it would plug directly into my router /switch with a fixed IP address. In the past I had thought about getting one of the linksys netdisks but this one looks to be much cheaper. Basically for the price of a drive I get a choice of either a USB or an Ethernet connection, plus lower heat and electrical requirements than my current server. I don't really need RAID I was just playing. A pair of these drives on my network with a program that would backup one to the other nightly would work equally well.

 

[Tom Foster]

Ted,

Looks like you got it figured out. I like mobility of those USB2 external drives. I got a Western Digital 120 GB for $150.00.

I'm going to buy one more tonight to add to my network.
:dance:

Tom

 

[Ted Martin]

Tom, do they come with any backup or mirroring software?

 

[Tom Foster]

No backup or mirroring software was included. But I have been writing back up scripts for over 20 years, so I write my own.

The way I do it is by using the xcopy command and path the data to 2 separate physical drives. There is no RAID controller needed and it’s much less CPU intensive.

I set the windows scheduler to run the back up script every 20 minutes. You can use WINCRON if you are a UNIX guy and prefer to use CRON.

Let me know if you need help writing the batch script

I have “taken apart” the whole Alamode WinTotal program and wrote a new front end in Visual Basic that connects to all the tables in the individual databases. I have also ported over all the tables to SQL 2000, so I’m free of the limitations of WinTotal as I can use clustered indexes instead of using table scans.