Moore Computer Development

Part 2: Hardware Installation

Inserting the drive into the tray was a bit of a squeeze. I made a mistake here, by sliding the drive in enough to connect the wires, then trying to attach the screws from below the tray. WRONG! On the second tray, I found an easier method. The drive attaches to a metal plate that sits on rubber pads and has a single screw holding it to the tray. I removed the screw to get that plate out of the tray. That's certainly an easier way to go about installing the drive (see the Drive in tray image below). The plate has four holes to mount it to the drive. The tray has holes that line up with the plate, so you can get to the screws through the bottom of the tray, but it's a pain to line up the screws. I ended up using tweezers on the first tray. I'm glad I found the better method the second time around. The cables are short, and the lid is a tight fit over the drive, but it does fit. I repeated the process for all five drives, and then stuck a piece of tape on the tray lid with a number so I would know which drive was which.

 

I'm unsure how helpful the rubber shock absorber pads are, though, as tight as the lid fits over the top. In theory, that pad cuts noise from drive vibration. But the lid basically touches the drive, so I doubt there's much dampening going on here.

 

Next I shut down my PC and unplugged it. I opened up the PC and inserted the rack into an open 5.25" bay. It is a long piece, so the fit is pretty tight against the cables coming out of the power supply. But it did fit. Routing the power and Serial ATA cables around was a bit awkward as well. I had to carefully route the SATA cable behind the power supply cables. I also had to find an open 5-pin power cable and get it into the rack while it was half-in and half-out, as there was not enough room to maneuver between the rack and the computer power supply.

After that, I closed up the PC and inserted the tray into the rack. This, too, was a tight squeeze. Buyer reviews had warned me this might happen and that it should clear up after the tray has been pulled out a few times. No worries, it locks in tight enough to work. I powered up Windows, which saw the new drive. I was able to work with it just like an internal SATA drive. I assigned it to D:, and got busy designing a backup strategy to use that drive.

The vendor was out of single-fan trays, so I ended up with two that have double fans in the front; those fans are noisy. I wish it was quiet enough not to notice. That, plus the lack of clear documentation are my only two complaints. And the documentation really isn't a big deal. It might have saved me a few minutes of having to think through the process and doing it the hard way on the first tray, though.

The tray / rack assembly only carries a one-year warranty. But for $25, it's not that big a deal to replace it if there are problems. Since there's no documentation, I'm not sure how you would go about claiming anything on the warranty anyway! the drives are under Seagate warranty for five years, so I don't have anything to worry about there.

 

(continued...)

Part 4: Analysis

The system outlined above is not perfect.  It is louder than the original PC.  It does not provide fail-over options should that PC shut down.  It does not work in parallel.  It does not have a graphical interface for searching backed up files nor robust logs.

It can be slow.  One day, it kept hitting files that were in use, which caused a second delay each time, and ended up running for 10 hours before it completed!  But most of the time it's done within one to two hours, which is not bad for a 250 - 300 Gb data set.

It's a disk drive, so there's no proprietary hardware required to read the data; just a working PC with the appropriate drive controller, which any modern PC will have.

Hard drives are fragile. These drives get carried around, dropped into car seats and everything else.  They probably will not last as long as a comparable non-portable drive.

The original plan was to rotate the drives once per week, taking a drive home each Friday.  If there's a catastrophic power surge that wipes out both my PC and the servers, then the customer could lose up to a week's data that way.  The computer in this case gets power from the a UPS, so that's not entirely impossible, though unlikely.  Based on that, the customer was encouraged to rotate drives at least every other day.

Pulling the drives can really confuse Windows.  While some motherboards can handle hot-swapping drives, the PC used here was not able to recognize the new drive when hot-swapping occured.  The user was instructed to shut the PC down before trading out the drives.

Overall, though, the customer was quite pleased with this method of backing up data.  They get more space that's faster to search through and has next to no learning curve.  There was no need to buy special software or expensive tapes on a regular basis.  They do not have to figure out how to make the special software do what it is supposed to do, or pay thousands for database plug-ins and various other options that should be part of any backup solution.

Based on the six months this has been in place, we see no reason to revert to tape systems in the near future.  For this customer at least, tape backup is dead.