Using USB Hard Drives For Disk Images?

anomaly asks: "I work for a fairly large company, and we're faced with the problem of maintaining images of hard disks for the hardware we use in our environment. We use Norton's Ghost for this process. We'd like to use a USB hard disk (because both the desktops and notebooks have USB interfaces) to store hard disk images, but Ghost requires DOS drivers in order to work. Does anyone know of a way that we could store, edit, and organize hard disk images as well as potentially installing the disk image via USB, or over a network? I suppose ideally we'd have some reliable, cheap network attached storage device (preferably in the $200-$500 range) - reliable in that we want to do 0 maintenance on these babies - so that many different hardware images could be stored and reinstalled as necessary. Any ideas?"

Comments

OFF-TOPIC?!?!?! Just how much ignorance is on /.?

[BitMan]

FIRST OFF, TO ANSWER THE ORIGINAL POSTERS QUESTION, SCSI IS ABOUT THE ONLY WAY TO GET DOS/REAL-MODE SUPPORT!!! JUST HOW THE F--- IS THE "OFF-TOPIC"??? [ Too much ignorance on /. IMHO!!! ]

Secondly, the TekRam DC-315U is a measly $15-20, does UltraSCSI (20MBps) and interfaces nicely to just about any old/new hard drive. It is completely supported by just about any OS (TekRam even has Linux and BSD drivers -- including distro installation driver disks). I buy one for all new PCs I get -- a smart move given the number of external Zip, Jaz, burners and whatnot that fly around the office.

Third, you can get late-model SCSI drives for under $100. Most will have enough storage for several cloned images. You don't need a modern SCSI drive, just one that will give you about 15MBps performance -- that's 10x the performance of USB!!! Add $20-40 for an external case, another $20-40 for cables and terminators and you're cooking! If you use Linux, you can hot-plug the solution and modprobe the TekRam driver on-the-fly!

Fourth, I do this for cloning. Yes, I do some over the network, but I don't always like to taxi my server in the middle of the day (among other reasons). And if I need to get the system up faster, SCSI gives me better performance than the network. Either way, USB is a slow pig and anyone who has used an external USB knows what I'm talking about! God, I cannot believe people have such ignorant, "say no to SCSI" attitudes! Geez!

Fifth, I'm glad someone else mentioned (since I forgot to) that PCMCIA SCSI cards are easily swappable, so yes, I use a PCMCIA SCSI card for the few notebook systems I have. I only need one card (and I have only one card).

Six, I do NOT disagree that IEEE1394 is a better, future solution. Frankly, I'm PO'ed that Intel is stalling on making it a standard feature in the southbridge chip (it was supposed to be standard with the PIIX4 southbridge!). I think AMD/VIA will force the issue with forthcoming chipsets and that will finally force Intel to put it on-board as well. Until then, TekRam SCSI cards are half the price and almost as fast (20MBps) as the 100-400Mbps (12.5-50MBps) Firewire cards. And, again, I'm NOT sure there is DOS/real-mode support.
[ But it's still good to see companies like Maxtor coming out with IEEE1394 drives (probably using a 33MBps 1394 to ATA bridge like this one). ]

-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith