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Backups: eSata, USB and FreeBSD
Some stupid benchmarking
Backups are stored on external harddrives here. Important data is stored on the Family Server and from there I regularly make backups with tar onto a USB harddisk (using a dirty bash script that has no intelligence: sorry, no listing).
Recently I've grabbed a external enclosure with hotswap as well as USB 2.0 and eSata ports (FANTEC MR-35US2). Until now I didn't had the time to play with eSata and the mainboard also doesn't have a real eSata port. A tiny adapter in a slot bracked solved this issue and after the update to FreeBSD 7.1 it felt right to give it a shot.
A quick read on some mailinglists and forums revealed that after powering on the disk and connecting it via eSata a
# atacontrol attach channel-no
should do the trick. Well: it did not, at first. I got
# atacontrol: ioctl(IOCATAATTACH): File exists
Some tries later I found that detaching it first (though there was nothing attached previously) works:
# atacontrol detach channel-no
# atacontrol attach channel-no
Now the drive is ready for mounting.
Some notes after testing:
- detach first, then attach
- never connect USB and eSata at the same time
- plugin in the harddrive correctly: you need to hear it spin up after powering on
I did some benchmarking with bonnie to get a feeling of possible speed improvements. Used disk is a SAMSUNG SP0411C/R/UU100-05 40GB drive:
-------Sequential Output-------- ---Sequential Input-- --Random--
-Per Char- --Block--- -Rewrite-- -Per Char- --Block--- --Seeks---
Machine MB K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU /sec %CPU
usb-40 1000 25078 19.7 24524 4.6 11110 2.4 17058 19.7 23623 2.4 483.9 0.9
esata-40 1000 52018 40.5 50939 9.6 16946 3.6 27835 32.0 41307 4.0 565.2 1.0
It's just a testdisk, backups are done to a 360GB Western Digital drive. I may repeat benchmarking with that one. Just need to do some more testing to see if eSata is stable enough to do backups with it.