Re: [OT] External Hard Disk

["Mal Lansell" <mal@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

--- In ukha_d@xxxxxxx, "Phil Harris" <phil@...> wrote:
>
> > Are those external enclosures like these:
> > http://tinyurl.com/2j6cof
>
> Yup...
>
> > i.e using firewire bridge boards?  If so, do the drives ever spin
down?
>
> They do if the machine they're connected to supports it - on the
Mac they
> can be spun down quite happily and will spin up again without
problems
> (apart from one hell of a delay while they spin up sequentially if
you're
> accessing data across all the drives which I do do).
>

I'm not using RAID.  The data is all video & music and is static,  so
it's easy to create a duplicate set of disks to store off-site.  I
can live with the occasional drive failure.  Browsing the collection
will be handled via a database on another machine, so I only need to
spin up a drive to play something from it.

> > I've been looking at using external storage (either USB2 or
Firewire)
> > but I've noticed that the single disk units I have at the moment
never
> > spin down.  Since the media will only be accessed occasionally
(and even
> > then, only one or two drives at once), this seems a bit of a
waste.
>
> I guess it depends on the OS you're using...
>
Win2k server.  Looks like its time to visit Google...