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High-Capacity PCMCIA Drives for Backup?
jspivack asks: "My dad is looking for a very portable backup system for his laptop. He's tired of going without his apps and data for days on end when it goes down - and since it's a laptop, anything from trackpad to screen to USB port problems means sending the whole computer in for repair. I figured this would be the perfect use for a high-capacity PCMCIA hard drive: he could just keep it in his slot and make a nightly carbon-copy of his main HD. No external messiness to deal with. And if his machine goes down, he just pops out the drive and pops it into a loaner machine. The problem is, I've googled around and it would seem that Toshiba only makes PCMCIA drives in a 5GB flavor, despite the fact that they have 1.8" drives going to 60GB. Have I missed some other high-capacity (>=20Gb) -internal- PCMCIA drives (Google's not perfect, and neither am I)?
Does anyone know if I could buy a 5GB PCMCIA drive and a larger 'embedded' drive and just swap the larger drive itself into the PCMCIA interface portion of the smaller drive? I know it would be taller, but both of his slots are open. Does anyone know if there are technological barriers to this hack?"
Otherwise, when they steal his laptop, they get 2 copies of the data and he'll have 0
Another possibility would be a very small external USB flash drive with very high capacity, for example http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/drives/5ad4/.
if he's not going to take the drive anywhere, just backup nightly, I believe there are PCMCIA -> IDE adapters that can do the job.
I know you mentioned INTERNAL drives but you'll likely pay through the nose for a drive like that.. try and find an adapter to the PCMCIA bridge and you'll have better success i think.
Got one off eBay for about $15, hot swappable and very portable. I put in a 6 gig that I bought used for under $10. This one runs off the USB port so there isn't any messy power cordage.
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You can buy the cases empty then add the drive you want to use. Cases are available for different drive sizes. Check out this link for an example of what you can get.
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Well, an alternative would be to choose a laptop brand that supports swapping of drives. My ex-boss has an IBM laptop with a removable tray that a laptop HD can be plopped into. That was one of the reasons she went with IBM: That particular external drive bay worked on most IBM brand laptops. I can also personally recommend Dell. I have an Inspiron 8200 and I have an external HD bay for it. In theory, I can buy a modern Inspiron and that bay will work on it, too. (Note: I cannot verify this, I could easily be wrong.) However, I'd just make sure my next laptop supports 2 drives. Fixed with a little screwdriver work.
:)
I'll be honest, though, I'm not sure you're approaching this the right way. Though that's not for me to decide (my apologies if I sound condescending) but I'd recommend using either firewire or network backup. It may not be as convenient in some ways, but there are some benefits:
1.) A network (even wireless) backup could happen automatically and sent to a machine with ridiculous amounts of storage.
2.) If you go with the PCMCIA solution, you risk losing the backup if you lose the machine. (i.e. stolen or dropped in water or something.) Basically, it'd be resilient against broader circumstances.
3.) You'd be able to approach this with already available technology, and you probably wouldn't need to buy anything extra.
Good luck.
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Another possibility; buy an 'embedded' drive and use the PCMCIA slot for Firewire/USB2 and use that to hook up and back up the laptop.
Embedded 60gb drives are cheaper than standalone 5gb drives aren't they?
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he could just keep it in his slot and make a nightly carbon-copy of his main HD
Unless the machine was identical, putting this carbon copy onto another machine will be painful. The 2k/XP HAL make it hard since it zeros in on all hardware and doesn't recover from major changes very well. Not a problem to restore once you get the machine back, but if the problem was software you are back to square one.
No external messiness to deal with. And if his machine goes down, he just pops out the drive and pops it into a loaner machine.
Not true for anything but plain old documents. Any software installed (I'm assuming this is Windows) will probably not run off of an external drive without reinstallation due to DLL installations and registry changes that happen during the install. If you Ghost the machine off of the external HD then you are screwed unless the loaner is identical. Even then, the owner might object to this.
In addition, as you've described, finding a capacity drive bigger than 5g is damn near impossible. Your best bet is to just use an external solution. An external laptop hd via usb would do just fine.
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If your dad has network access from the laptop -- and even better, wireless access that's available all the time -- you could hang one of these network storage puppies off the local network and use it to do one master backup and then deltas periodically. The Linksys unit comes with backup software that supposedly will do this very thing.
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Why not use an ipod? Yes, it is external, but you have a 20 or 40 GB hard drive for backing up data, and you can listen to music.
I was looking into similar products for a project at work, and we settled on CMS Backup Solutions They have both PCMCIA, Firewire and USB drives, in varying capacities. If you look at their page, you'll notice that the PCMCIA drive is 75Mbps. This is not a limitation of the drive, but of the PCMCIA standard. We were using Ghost to clone the entire drive to these devices, which can take up to 10 hours on PCMCIA, but under 2 on USB2 (480Mbps). The CMS drives come with backup software as well, however I cannot give you any details on how it works, as we had already decided to go with Norton Ghost.
As well, as others have mentioned, you can get a removable drive for the laptop itself. This is definately the fastest method (800Mbps). I have used these on compaq laptops, they hold a normal laptop HD, and you just swap it into the expansion slot when you need it.
Why not go with a 30-60GB ipod photo? You aren't going to find a mobile device with this amount of storage that's much smaller. Plus he can rip all those old Stones albums.
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As someone who once tried to take apart a legacy PCMCIA card to fix (we couldn't find another to order) let me advise you against trying to buy a PCMCIA Hdd and swaping out its internal drive for a larger one. I'd try an external USB drive or a flash drive.
it's to a 5GB solution. Mentioned in the post, and rejected as too small -OP
As has already been noted, if the loan machine isn't identical, a drive image might not be a lot of use.
Why not concentrate on getting the stuff he REALLY couldn't do without onto a backup (I'm guessing, but probably email, documents and the data for one or two applications), along with practicing what to do with the backups when his PC goes back to get repaired? Unless he's into video in a big way, the chances are that "all the data that he can't live without" isn't that huge - maybe less than a DVD.
Maybe a combination of techniques would work -
Use an external USB drive backed up once a week or so, and combine that with the internal PCMCIA drive making delta backups...
That way you could have a complete snapshot no older than 1 week old, and still maintain a current backup too.
Also, try arranging the drive to facilitate this. Partition the drive so that all the programs are on the C: partition, and all data is stored on a D: partition. That way, you can ghost the C: partition for your applications, and it will be easier to copy only your data from the D: drive.
No, I don't trust in god. He'll have to pay up front, like everybody else.
Then he won't have all the hardware issues that plague the PC world...My Pismo Laptop has went down a whopping ONCE since I got it in early 2k I believe it was...and it is used every day, all day...
I have a fairly ancient thinkpad (233 Mhz) but I _love_ that feature, which I call "warm swappable" since you can swap them so fast the drive will still be quite warm. Hibernate, swap, wake from hibernation - it's dualbooting without messy partitioning. I suppose I should really just put a single bigger drive in there, but still.
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Easy to use, cheap software allows for full recoverability in the event of a drive failure. Mirror the drive using Symantec Livestate Recovery or the like, and bob's your uncle
The third option is, of course, buy a Mac laptop. Unfortunately, these are much more attractive (look sweeter, are known to be more expensive) and therefore more vulnerable to theft. On the other hand, they are reliable enough that a backup drive shouldn't be needed all that often.
The OS is more reliable then Windows, however the hardware can still fail. They use standard disks, standard memory, and a system board with electronics the same as other companies. My Powerbook is in the shop currently due to a weird disk corruption issue that looks to be due to bad memory.
On the plus side, all Mac laptops have 6 pin powered firewire ports, for a 100gb backup option using a 2.5 inch disk that the Mac will also happially boot from.
How often does this thing die? Is it really that much of an issue?
Yes, laptops die, but if it's the same make/model repeatedly, maybe a different one is in order.
As always, back up your docs/personal files elsewhere.
get a laptop with 2 hard drives in raid-1,
and never worry about backup again.
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Last year at NAB, Panasonic showed off its new 'P2' camera system which records on what seem to be PCMCIA cards. From what I remember, they planned to have 32 or 64 GB drives when they finally release the full product (September 2006 according to this article).
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"Of course, running his lappie on Linux would both stop the apparently regular self-immolation"
If you read the original post, you'd see the problems with this laptop were hardware-related, not OS-related: "and since it's a laptop, anything from trackpad to screen to USB port problems means sending the whole computer in for repair."
Linux is a great OS, but would you care to tell us how it's going to keep his trackpad and USB ports from failing? You must be using that experimental 2.9 kernel with self-healing hardware features - the year 2020 sounds great, but remember some of us are living in 2005.
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If you *have* to have a hotswappable HD ready to go. Buy him a USB or Firewire external case and put a laptop HD in it, get a copy of ghost and ghost the machine to the new HD every night. This solution *sucks*. And im not sure ghost supports USB/Firewire HDs?
If your dad is likely to come home most nights, convince him he needs to keep ALL his work files in a single directory (My Documents is ideal for this). Grab a copy of Unison and sync the data back to a home machine each night over the network. Its pretty efficent as unison will only send back files that have changed. If his HD dies at some point -- goto best buy and buy a new laptop drive which you were going to have to do ANYWAYS for your hot swap plan. This plan is great if: your dad comes home often, you have enough HD space to back up his documents (delete some porn if you dont). AND e is not constnatly creating huge files (GB size).
This is what I do to backup my laptop -- I have about 5Gb of documents, and never more then 10 megs gets changed at once. I even have a 4gb virtual machine I backup now (in addition to the 5gbs), and that takes like 10 mins.
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Try again in en_US not en_GB . . .
If he's backing stuff up anyway, he can do it to a USB2+Firewire enclosure; if the lappie's hard drive puts the heads through the platter, he can still boot and run from that. If either of USB2 or Firewire suffers a hardware problem, he can still backup through (and boot from) the other buss. Easily done with Linux, hardly done with MS Windows.
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For the love of god, please stop saying "lappie".
For fuck's sake, it isn't even SHORTER than "laptop".
If your laptop suffers hardware failures on such a regular basis, perhaps it's time to get a new laptop? Perhaps even from a different manufacturer. The prices are so low these days, it might even cost you less than a PCMCIA drive.
The OS is more reliable then Windows, however the hardware can still fail. They use standard disks
Yes and no. They mount the disc in shock-absorbent rubber (which Toshiba/Compal didn't for my x86 laptop, relying on the rigidity of the plastic case to protect it) and there is a "sudden motion sensor" either in the laptop or the drive, which, under the control of software, can unload the heads before the laptop hits the ground. More details here. IBM do something similar on their Thinkpads.
I've never had a problem with mouse/trackpad drivers on Windows, in the 10+ years I've used it personally and professionally. In fact, I've never even heard of this happening. I'm sure you can Google and find examples of problems but I assure you this is rare.
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IBM do something similar
Ooh! Krug choose IBM!
Get a PCMCIA to Firewire adapter and hook up an external Firewire hard drive.
Get a PCMCIA to USB2 adapter and hook up an external USB2 hard drive or flash drive. (You said there were USB port issues on the laptop; hopefully the PCMCIA card would remedy those.)
Get a PCMCIA to CompactFlash adapter and an IBM MicroDrive (they're available for up to 6GB) and put the two of them together inside the laptop.
A PCMCIA hard drive is basically going to be that setup, enclosed in a neat little package. If you'll notice, a 1.8" hard drive is slightly larger than a PCMCIA card, and wouldn't wouldn't fit along with a controller interface into a PCMCIA card package. For making "PCMCIA hard drives" they're thus limited to 1" drives (MicroDrives and such) and therefore the 5-6GB ceiling you're running into.
Sorry, but these are your only viable options.
and on ever "Ask Slashdot" there is some asshole who contends that "fucking googling it" would have easily found the solution...only to find the wrong solution.
I've used an external PCMCIA-IDE interface to externally mount laptop drives of various sizes. The 5g limit is probably just a factor of the design age of pcmcia interfaced drives.
I was doing backups with dd, gzip and netcat, and it was awfully slow. My recollection is that it was the PCMCIA interface itself that was the limiting factor.
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Of course, IBM's solution only works in conjunction with IBM's software (Windows-only, AFAIK).
I like "lappie", and if it puts you in mind of private dancers or hyperintelligent kelpies, post with your real nick to say so.
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The thing which fails might not be the trackpad specifically, but even XP will drop or confuse devices at random sometimes.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Why not external via PCMCIA card? There are SCSI cards which you can use with a SDLT320 (160GB per tape, more with compression depending on your data). There are SATA cards, so you could hang a couple of 200GB SATA drives off it and run at a decent speed for not a great deal of cash outlay. Then there's the firewire and USB options. All this assumes that you don't mind carting another box around with your laptop.