Adding USB 2.0/Firewire Card

No I have not been able to find a USB 2.0 card that is PCI-X.  What I finally did was hook the USB drive up to a workstation and do the backup over the network.  If you turn off your Virus protection you get about 250 MB/min over a 100Mbps connection.  You should get better speed if you have a gigabit connection.

Hope this helps.

DAN

you read my mind. my optiplex is a 1000 Intel card, and the switch is GigE, so 10-4 on the bandwidth... but lots of folks walk by my office when i'm not there.

Server room, locked and safe- so that's where i'd like to keep such a steal-able thing like an external drive :(

Couldn't you convert the external drive to a NTFS partition and set the permissions on it such that you can only get access to the drive information when it is hooked to your network and group permissions so that only you can get at it?

DAN

I would get a cheap celeron machine and put it in your server room then.  The cost of that is still a lot cheaper than buying a comparable tape drive subsystem

Hope this helps

DAN

Dan,

I hear ya. We have a 20/40 dds4 now, and will be getting a AIT changer this summer, so versioning and tape-backups (and even budget) aren't the biggest issues.

just looking for some suspenders to go with my belt to cover catastrophic loss - many of the tapes i take home seem to come back funky, maybe it's just coincidence, maybe b/c our 20/40 has seen 4.5 years of 7day/week use, but we get more failures on tapes that have traveled.
... and b/c of scheduling issues (i'm not there every day) and the fact we can't fit a full data backup and 4 system-states on one 20/40 tape - means taking home tapes is an imperfect system.

and to another machine to patch and sqeeze into the rack ain't on the menu :)

It works fine for 2003 server. The server says the drivers are not WHQL certified but thats a red herring. Works fine with WIN98SE/ME/2000/XP/2003 and mac OSX.

Its a great mule for moving big data from desktop to server etc or you can use it as a shared drive where only the ones with the passcode can WRITE to the drive but many can read the drive.

I have no issues with it. Never seen it before but it was a 120 gig drive and under $200 dollars with no server setup required and No tcpip so its not a hacker magnet.

there are tech workarounds (even 3rd party encryption apps) which i do apply to my backup tapes -- but when a private school's "offsitebackup" vessel is stolen, with SS numbers of parents, grades of kids, donor's federal tax id's "they can't get to the actual data, sir" is not what i want to say to the Board of Trustees :)

physical security is not something i'm willing to give up, for a 'scheduled' service - in a pinch, yes, but not for a drive that will sit on my pc (or 2 drives, i'd swap out every monday, one at home, one at work) that will scream "take me" to a luser that visits the campus for the intermural sports, when i happen to be away from my office (which is a lot)

neat. i have a quote for one at CDWG pending...

i wonder what a network dump of the data going by looks like...

meaning, is it SMB to the MAC address?

Message Edited by hakalugi on 04-20-2005 03:57 PM

speedstep, thanks for the link.

their product page is 404, and their downloads page has XP, 2000, me, 98, and mac/linux - but no mention of Server 2003

have you used it on server 2003?

Using XIMETA NDAS storage fits this requirement and does not compromise the security of the drive if its locked in a secure area.

http://www.ximeta.com/products/network_drives/netdisk/index.html

• No use of TCP/IP (High Security)
• High Performance (25 - 400%) faster than USB
• Easy Use (Just like local drive)

Network - Share external storage throughout the LAN
Direct - Direct data path from the NetDisk™ to the host
Attached - NetDisk™ connects via Ethernet
Storage - Increase the storage capacity of your network

You dont even need a switch. You can attach using a cat5 cable from a
Nic port in the server directly to the drive.

I got my drive at radio shack and was using it within 10 minutes of installing the driver. I dont think I will ever look back at USB or firewire and the associated problems.

The link should work better now.

Message Edited by SpeedStep on 04-20-2005 04:49 PM