BYTE.com > Chaos Manor > 2005
Rooting Out Spyware
By Jerry Pournelle
March 21, 2005
(Rooting Out Spyware
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Column 296 (Continued from the Previous Week)
It's a RAID
Seagate USB 2.0 external drives are wonderful. They work right out of the box, with all systems we have tried them on. The 100 GB version is both rugged and portable. The 400 GB version is solidly built and runs quietly, and is used as a backup to my main communications system.
The CMS Bounceback Express software that comes with the Seagate USB External drives is not as effective as the full CMS Bounceback software that comes with CMS external backup drives, in that Bounceback Express doesn't really know how to deal with Outlook PST files when Outlook is running while the system tries to make backups. If you intend to use the Seagate USB 2.0 external drives for backup of systems running Outlook, either close Outlook before the scheduled backup begins, get different backup software, or every now and then run a batch file that does an xcopy of Outlook.pst to the appropriate backup folder.
That's software. Otherwise these Seagate drives are marvelous: quiet, fast, and efficient; and they look pretty good too.
We did have one problem but that was my fault, not Seagate's. After I installed the Seagate 400 GB USB 2.0 External drive on Anastasia, my Intel D875 Pentium 4 3.2 GHZ main communications system, I noticed that it was taking Anastasia a long time to reboot. She would just sit there displaying the Intel splash screen. Eventually she would boot, but it might take two minutes or more. When she did come up, she might or might not recognize the external Seagate USB drive; if she didn't, turning it off and back on fixed the problem. A quick experiment showed that the problem went away if I turned off the external drive before booting up, then turned it on after Windows was stable.
Then I remembered that Anastasia already has a backup: two Seagate 200 GB serial ATA drives in a RAID 1 (mirrored drives) configuration. This is run by the Intel D875 motherboard, and that ability to do RAID in hardware is one of the advantages to modern Intel motherboards.
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