Keeping Data Safe

Having had two drives fail on me in the past six months (NTFS corruption, not hardware failure...or so several utilities tell me), I'm looking for a good solution to keep my data safe.

First, I'm going to buy a pair of 160Gb Hitachi SATA ($98x2) drives to replace my current main drives. I may or may not RAID-1 them at some point. Still undecided. (I boot from & keep my OSes on a separate 20Gb drive.)

I'm going to move the [questionable]old drives (160Gb Maxtor & 120Gb WD SE) to another old box I have, which is currently collecting dust. I was thinking of popping a giga-ethernet card ($15x2) into both boxes and using the old one as a network-backup unit. Linux + ext3. If I recall, it has 256Mb of ram and an old AMD K6-2 300mhz cpu in it. Is that a sufficient CPU for Giga-ethernet not to choke? The drives themselves will be on a PCI ATA133 card.

Any other options out there? DVD backups are time consuming and use up way too many DVDs per backup. Tape is outside of my budget. RAID-1 (or RAID-5) are options, but they're not true backup solutions, just fail-safes.

seriously doubt its the HDDs themselves
ranks pretty low on the list for corruption

Corruption 101
RAID will not protect you from Data Corruption in most cases

Right. I'm aware RAID won't protect vs. corruption. Or versus user error, etc. But it adds a layer of data security.

The reason I'm a bit leary of the drives themselves is that the older has been on for about 25,000 hours and the younger about 19,000.

Any ideas on whether the K6-2 cpu can handle 1000Mbps ethernet?

Venner said:

Any ideas on whether the K6-2 cpu can handle 1000Mbps ethernet?

Click to expand...

I would think it could, but would touch base over in Networking

I run multiple RAID5 arrays, and backup to CDR currently