“With an Ultra320 SCSI port, we can connect as many as 15 hard
drives to the bus. However, SCSI hard drives still are expensive,
and it was beyond our budget to buy more than two hard drives. In
my design, the second hard drive is for backup purposes only. I did
not choose RAID 0 (data stripping for better performance) nor RAID
1 (mirroring), as I wanted to do the data backup manually.“Following a Linux mini how-to I found on hard-disk upgrades, I
set up my second drive exactly the same as my first. I did not
choose RAID 1 basically due to performance concerns. If RAID 1 is
set up, every write (save to hard drive) triggers another write on
the mirror disk and more time is needed. As for teaching purposes,
my users’ (student) data is important but not as critical as
business data. Instead of having a second write each time a user
saves his or her work on the server, I wrote a simple backup script
and placed it under /etc/cron.daily. With it, all users’ data is
backed up to my second drive at 1:00am…”
Related Story:
Linux
Journal: A Computer Lab with No Windows, Part I(Feb 19,
2004)