imroot.com

One of my instructors in college used to say “Never under estimate the bandwith of station wagon full of floppies travelling down the interstate”. While I haven’t ever had that experience, and really am not sure I ever care too, moving large amounts of data in a hurry is always somewhat interesting.

This week I was doing some upgrades on a server and had about 50GB of data I needed to move. The new server was equipped with SAS drives/controllers. I wanted to move this data quickly so my customers wouldn’t be cut off from the data for too long. Any type of network/share based transfer was just going to be way to slow. Ultimately I would have rather just put the drives from the old server into the new server, copy the data locally and remove the old drives. But since this server was setup for SAS it wasn’t an option.

The drives on the old server were IDE (yeah….OLD server is right). I asked a few people for ideas when Ron mentioned that they had some USB to IDE atapters they used for troublshooting, etc. He didn’t know if they would work on linux, but I figured it was worth a try. Sounded the the best option going, so I bought one from newegg.com.

This has turned out to be one of the best little gadgets I have ever purchased. I got it, and immediately hooked it up to the new server that was running Red Hat Enterprise 4 and immediately my test drive showed up….pretty much like a jump drive. I started doing some data copy speed tests and moved a 1.6GB file in one minute flat when connected to a USB 2.0 port!

So today I did the server upgrade. Removed the drives from the old server, used my USB to IDE adapter and within an hour had copied my 50GB of data to the new server. Thanks Ron!

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 14th, 2006 at 7:14 pm and is filed under Tech Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.