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piggles 02-19-2007 07:24 PM

Advice on network drives
 
Since my internal HD of my powerbook died recently, I'm looking into getting a network drive to do regualr backup over wireless network. I only started using superduper recently (will buy a copy soon for smart update) and by the time I realized my hard drive was failing I haven't made the clone of my drive and it was too late...

Anyhow, I'm looking into something like LaCie Ethernet Disk mini, 250GB or perhaps 400GB for its price. Is this a good product once I format it to ext3, or is there something comparable in size/price that one might recommend?

I also read bunch of comments saying backing up over wireless network is slow- but how slow is it? Right now my wireless router (WGR614) is set for both 802.11b and g and my powerbook has Airtport Extreme. I expect it to take a while for initial backup, but usually how long will smart backup take? minutes or 10's of minutes? My hard drive is 80GB and about 30GB is system and apps.

I'll appreciate any comments.

dnanian 02-19-2007 09:41 PM

Most of the low-end NAS devices (like the LaCie) are pretty slow, even discounting the wireless.

Personally, I use and recommend the Infrant ReadyNAS NV+. It's fast, redundant, reliable and supports Macs nicely...

piggles 02-20-2007 03:12 PM

Well I wish I had a grand to drop on a really nice NAS like infrant Ready NAS, but that's not the case. (but some day...) I guess the question about the cheaper NAS isn't IF it is slow but HOW slow it is. How long do you think it will take for doing smart update on 30GB system/app files?
And have you done any tests on those LaCie Ethernet Disk? Are they reliable?
If it is way too slow, I may just scrap the idea for now and stick to my firewire drive...
I'll just have to remember to connect it regularly to do backups.

dnanian 02-20-2007 04:07 PM

The ReadyNAS is about $600 without drives, so it's not that expensive.

Anyway, after making sure the LaCie is formatted as ext3 (or something else non-FAT32 that supports large files), and using SMB, I'd expect it to go at about 1MB/s during the initial backup. Subsequent smart updates will be faster -- how fast depends on the number of changes made.

piggles 02-20-2007 05:18 PM

Partition size and system performance
 
I appreciate the input. Since having a NAS is really only for convenience, I may just wait until I have money to get infrant like you suggested and stick to my backing up on my FW800 drive.

Now I have a different question: I heard from many experts that OSX uses considerable amount of free disk space to run its things and therefore having more space on a startup drive the better. Now, if I were to partition my 80GB internal HD on Powerbook G4 for sandbox, should I be more concerned to have more space on the original startup drive or the partition for the sandbox? Will having only few GB free space on sandbox slow down the system performance?

dnanian 02-20-2007 05:20 PM

Before you create a Sandbox, you should see how big you'll need it to be. You can do so by creating it on a larger-than-necessary external partition.

Note that many of the iLife applications store a lot of data in the global /Library. These can considerably increase the size of a Sandbox. You can elect to share much of their Application Support files -- see the User's Guide for the steps.

You want around 15-20% free space for temporary and swap files...

piggles 02-20-2007 05:26 PM

ok, so let's say if my sandbox needs to be 10GB, then I should set the partition size to be at least 12GB? Will making the partition size bigger help run things faster?

dnanian 02-20-2007 05:26 PM

Only up to a point, of course...

piggles 02-20-2007 05:30 PM

I'll just give it a try and see how it does. Thanks for the great product!


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