&(#% laptop hard drives..
Woke up and wandered in to start work for the day, and noted that my laptop’s hard drive was again making the ‘click-click-click’ that so many IDE hard drives make right before they find a new occupation as paperweights.
So, drop everything and configure samba on my 2T system so that I can back up my laptop to it. Start MS backup, cross my fingers that the 2G file limit fix on Samba actually works. (We’ll see, heh) Backup starts.
Ever watch a system back up over a 100 megabit link? At Epoch, we thought 100 megabits was blazingly fast, but guess what – we had systems with <40G disks! I wonder if anyone makes a gigabit PCMCIA card, and if so, what it might set me back.. I'm sure Google could answer that question, but I'm also sure that it won't be somewhere I can get it today. So stick it on the list of things to fix someday and leave backup running in the background.. Gigabit ethernet is pretty cool, though. It starts to make network-attached storage make sense even for moderately demanding tasks. I doubt if you could, you know, edit video over it - and in fact I don't have a clue what the performance is like on my LAN as I've only got one machine with a gig card (the 2T system aforementioned) I did order 3 gig cards today so I can put gig cards in all of my desktops. I'm starting to run low on Ethernet ports again.. might be time to get another switch. (I have a bad habit of just cascading 8 port switches to get wherever I want to go. Actually, it's worked so far...)
August 22nd, 2006 at 1:59 pm
To boot off a linux liveCD distro of some sort with a Firewire external HD enclosure to do a backup from the laptop to the FW HD then dealing with GigE.
Also, Netgear has a decent 16 port GigE switch for about 130 if you look on Pricegrabber.
August 23rd, 2006 at 7:33 am
As far as I can tell the 2GB limit was fixed on Samba.
There are Gigabit PCMCIA cards..actually they’re Cardbus (32-bit) cards. You can probably get one for $20.
I’ve started using SMART to monitor my hard disks.