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?"

Comments

Other possibilites

[CMGaretJax]

Another possibility would be a very small external USB flash drive with very high capacity, for example http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/drives/5ad4/.

Use USB2/Firewire if at all possible

[Elektrance]

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.

PCMCIA Mods

[UndyingShadow]

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.

Re:Dude ... follow TF link...

[jspivack]

it's to a 5GB solution. Mentioned in the post, and rejected as too small -OP

Re:Not only that, you can back up a meaningful amo

[Drakino]

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.

Madness

[Monkelectric]

This is pretty close to madness. One of the first thing you learn as a consultant is to not let the CUSTOMER tell you what they need -- theyre almost always wrong (and so are you). :)

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.