Using SATA drives in hot swap enclousure as a backup solution?

  • Thread starter Thread starter frank
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frank

I'm trying to find a backup solution based on SATA drives in hot swap
enclosures.
The backup is really more a spare copy. I want to do this on a Windows 2003
server.
It seems to be more difficult to do than I thought...

Would any SATA enclosure work with a regular SATA controller? Does Windows
support the hot swap?
What do I need?

Here is what I tried so far:
I ended up getting the Promise FastTrak S150 TX4 RAID controller and one
SuperSwap 1100. The regular SATA controller doesn't support hot-swap
according to Promise. Currently I'm using two SATA drives. One in the
SuperSwap and one fixed.

I think hotswap would work if I use a RAID 1 configuration.
However I think for my backup plan it is simpler to use the drives as
regular drives.

I ended up creating two arrays (Stripe 0). Each array has one drive.
This way I can assign both drives a drive letter.

However the hot swap feature doesn't work. If I remove the drive in the
SuperSwap 1100 and put it back neither NT nor the Promise software
recognizes the fact that the drive is back. I needed to create a new array
and reformat the drive.
 
I'm trying to find a backup solution based on SATA drives in hot swap
enclosures.
The backup is really more a spare copy. I want to do this on a Windows 2003
server.
It seems to be more difficult to do than I thought...
Click to expand...

We took the easy way out, putting the removable backup
drives on a workstation (or server) that we can reboot
when needed. No worries about hot swap issues at all.

Our next upgrade will bump the workstation's capacity up
so that we can spool the backup files to an internal
drive and then do a mass-copy to the removable drive as
needed.

(There's dozens of ways to skin a cat.)
 
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