big drives

?? Find a way to make a teraCHOMP..

If you don't organise, you probably won't find it. With large amounts of data the organisation needs to work from early on. I know one person that doesn't organise their data and it's complete chaos.

NT

I did that at one time, but quickly found buying more HDD storage made far more sense. Optical discs stopped being practical here long ago. Far too small & too unreliable.

NT

I never considered those as real hard drives. More like 'Designed by Rube Goldberg and built by Lucas' scratchpad memory. I scrapped some of those drives from bank computers that stored words, so the people could phone the bank to check their balance, and the computer could 'speak' to them over a phone line. Some later units had an etched glass disk with optical audio tracks for better quality. I also worked on the drum recorders used in telephone exchanges to store and replay weather reports for airfields. They had multiple heads, so that you didn't have to wait for it to return to the beginning to deliver the entire message. The heads were spaced about five seconds apart.

--
Never piss off an Engineer! 

They don't get mad. 

They don't get even. 

They go for over unity! ;-)

Use HDD's as the "off-line" backups. Buy a SATA dock (or FW or ) and a bunch of bare drives...

We are very good at organizing and controlling formally-released stuff, the things manufacturing uses to make things, and that engineering uses as the baseline for revs. Manufacturing and test also have work procedures, test procedures, and test results, which are not formally released but are pretty well organized.

But every engineer has their own working files on their PC, and maybe interesting data sheets and vacation pictures and such, that have no consistant organization.

One of our network drives has public work-in-process folders, one per unfinished project, and they have sort of evolved to have similar structures that everyone mostly uses. That helps disseminate a common structure. We back up that drive regularly, too, so some interesting note or pic is never lost, even though it's not officially released.

My rules is that people can dwell in their own personal chaos during development (I even let some people use a VCS) but a released documentation package must be pristine.

If anybody finds out something interesting about a part, even as a hand-scribbled note or graph, we put that into the parts data base. Files like BADAMP.TXT.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

USB terabyte drives are cheap and great for physical backup. Any PC, laptop even, can read the files later.

As long as USB is supported.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

Yes, but this opens up a vulnerability: that can accidentally corrupt/alter/discard a "backup". Most of my "archive" resides on large consumer drives (lower cost per byte, easy to acquire a second/third/fourth copy of the data, etc. -- without requiring it to be part of a spinning RAID array) so I can hand-carry a volume to any machine that I want and access it "locally" (i.e., like being able to pull a drive *out* of a RAID array and access it on ANY machine).

But, this means there is the chance that the medium can be altered by that other system. And, no way of *knowing* that this has occurred. Hence the reason I "scrub" (verify) drives whenever they are mounted in the "system" ("Ah, I see volume127 has been mounted on machine Pinky. Let me see where I was in my verification activity when last I encountered that drive and continue where I left off...")

[Of course, this means the file system chosen for the medium must be supported on any machines that want to access the contents "locally". By accessing it through some other protocol (e.g., SMB/NFS share), you can hide some of this from the client.]

The other problem with USB drives is they tend to be physically larger than "bare" drives AND you have to keep track of a particular power supply for that particular drive enclosure (if you have lots of bare drives, none of them need power supplies -- just the *dock* does!)

That's why we have so many of them. A one-year-old file has been off-site backed up, to different drives, 12 times.

A 5-year old file, 60 times.

So far, when I've pulled a drive from storage and tried to access backup files, it has worked every time.

Most of my "archive" resides on large

We use tiny terabyte USB drives with a captive USB pigtail cable. They don't need extra power supplies; just plug them into a USB port on any PC. I'm sure speed suffers from using a single USB port for power, but that doesn't matter.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

All mine run on 12v.

NT

All mine run off the USB port. Some higher performance drives come with a Y cable that has two USB connectors, to slurp more power, but our tiny backup drives have just a single short pigtail USB cable.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

I have (HDD) drives that run off 12V, 12V&5V and USB-powered. The 12V-only drives have different inner/outer diameter "barrel" connectors so a power supply for one isn't likely to physically

*fit* another. [I have other drives that aren't mentioned here that have additional power supply constraints. And, some that are AC mains powered]

The 12V&5V drives use a polarized 4-pin connector (similar to but different). Many months ago, I discovered that a power supply for a different device using the same physical connector had a different pinout -- the

12 & 5 volt pins being swapped -- that made short order out of trashing a HDD and its enclosure. [I've since labeled the offending power supplies -- I have half a dozen of them -- with "Do NOT use for Disk Drives!". I can't simply discard them as the devices they power would then be useless. And, I don't feel inclined to reqire the devices AND the power supplies to be consistent with the other HDD enclosures!]

The USB-powered drives come in three flavors:

- powered from a single USB(2) connection

- powered by a USB "Y-cable" (unsupported by the standard)

- powered by one of the above with an external 5V supply option

While it is relatively easy to ensure the "right" power supply is paired with a laptop, for example (just stick it in the laptop case alongside the laptop to which it applies!), this isn't as easy to do with HDD, MO, CD, DVD, etc. "external enclosures" -- unless you keep the power supply plugged into the enclosure!

P-Touch labeller is a great investment! Just crank out labels for EVERY power supply, wall wart, etc. that could potentially get "confused" or "misplaced". (Also handy for putting hostnames on network devices AND their current loginnames/passwords)

Because there is a demand doesn't mean it's a good idea. Times change.