One-to-many drive copy using SATA?

  • Thread starter Thread starter WiderNetTech
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WiderNetTech

Hi,

Using SATA drives is there a way to copy/mirror one drive to many
drives simultaneously?

I'd like to have a SATA card with 8 connectors and be able to use it to
duplicate 7 drives from a master.

Cheers!

-Peter
The WiderNet Project
 
WiderNetTech said:
Hi,

Using SATA drives is there a way to copy/mirror one drive to many
drives simultaneously?

I'd like to have a SATA card with 8 connectors and be able to use it to
duplicate 7 drives from a master.
Click to expand...

If you can find the special ute that will do this, then that shouldn't be a problem.
 
Previously WiderNetTech said:
Hi,
Click to expand...
Using SATA drives is there a way to copy/mirror one drive to many
drives simultaneously?
Click to expand...
I'd like to have a SATA card with 8 connectors and be able to use it to
duplicate 7 drives from a master.
Click to expand...

One way I see is doing a 8-way RAID1, first with all but the master
drive as "failed" then reactivate the other drives. Whether this is
fast is another question.

You can also write a C programm that reads the master drive raw in
blocks and writes simultaneously to the slave drives. Simple to
program, at least under any Unix, but speed is again uncertain.

What is your application? What are your speed requirements?

Arno
 
On UNIX, if the drives are named sda-sdh, you use
cd /dev; tee <sda sdb ... sdh >null

I tried the unxutils version for Windows, but it did not work correctly.
tee <imagefile //./physicaldrive1 ... >nul
 
I work for a non-profit project at The University of Iowa and we want
an inexpensive way to duplicate 250GB and larger hard drives containing
content collected from the Internet in an off-line browsable and
searchable format. These drives are then used in schools, clinics and
universities in areas of the world where Internet access is extremely
limited or non-existant.

When I copy one drive to using SATA, I can copy 173GB in about 3 hours
and 45 minutes (+/-900MB per minute). When our collection was smaller
and we used IDE drives we would use a second-hand drive duplicator and
we could duplicate drives at 450MB per minute. We have even tried using
RAID1 arrays to duplicate drives, but the RAID tables persist and cause
problems later on which result in corruption of the data.

If we were able to copy drives at a rate of 1GB per minute, that would
be great.

I will suggest to one of our student programmers the idea of writing a
program to copy raw blocks from one device to several devices and see
what we they can do.

Thanks for your suggestions and interest. I'll post back what we end up
using for a solution.

-Peter
The WiderNet Project
 
Hi Eric,

This is interesting. Right now we're using Windows XP and Server 2000,
but we will be setting up a version of our server on Linux. When we get
that up and running I'm going to test tee and see what it can do.

I'll post back my results.

-Peter
The WiderNet Project
 
Previously WiderNetTech said:
I work for a non-profit project at The University of Iowa and we want
an inexpensive way to duplicate 250GB and larger hard drives containing
content collected from the Internet in an off-line browsable and
searchable format. These drives are then used in schools, clinics and
universities in areas of the world where Internet access is extremely
limited or non-existant.
Click to expand...
When I copy one drive to using SATA, I can copy 173GB in about 3 hours
and 45 minutes (+/-900MB per minute). When our collection was smaller
and we used IDE drives we would use a second-hand drive duplicator and
we could duplicate drives at 450MB per minute. We have even tried using
RAID1 arrays to duplicate drives, but the RAID tables persist and cause
problems later on which result in corruption of the data.
Click to expand...
If we were able to copy drives at a rate of 1GB per minute, that would
be great.
Click to expand...

Should be doable with PCI and no more than, say, 4 drives total.
For more drives you may need PCI-X or PCI-E as bus and maybe
more than one controller.
I will suggest to one of our student programmers the idea of writing a
program to copy raw blocks from one device to several devices and see
what we they can do.
Click to expand...

It is not really difficult. There could be some system limits
you run into, but basically I think hacking, e.g., "dd_rescue"
(code available here: http://www.garloff.de/kurt/linux/ddrescue/)
to accept more than one target should do the job.
Thanks for your suggestions and interest. I'll post back what we end up
using for a solution.
Click to expand...

Please do.

Arno
 
WiderNetTech said:
I work for a non-profit project at The University of Iowa and we want
an inexpensive way to duplicate 250GB and larger hard drives containing
content collected from the Internet in an off-line browsable and
searchable format. These drives are then used in schools, clinics and
universities in areas of the world where Internet access is extremely
limited or non-existant.

When I copy one drive to using SATA, I can copy 173GB in about 3 hours
and 45 minutes (+/-900MB per minute). When our collection was smaller
and we used IDE drives we would use a second-hand drive duplicator and
we could duplicate drives at 450MB per minute. We have even tried using
RAID1 arrays to duplicate drives, but the RAID tables persist and cause
problems later on which result in corruption of the data.

If we were able to copy drives at a rate of 1GB per minute, that would
be great.

I will suggest to one of our student programmers the idea of writing a
program to copy raw blocks from one device to several devices and see
what we they can do.

Thanks for your suggestions and interest. I'll post back what we end up
using for a solution.
Click to expand...

Have you considered approaching manufacturers of drive duplicators to see if
any will make a donation?
 
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