Has anyone tried using this on their Linux box?

http://fwdepot.com/thestore/product_...oducts_id/1646

It's the only Firewire 400 with built in RAID capabilities I can find. I'm planning to put in 2 x 1TB drives so that I get 1TB of redundant storage.

I trust it has been long enough w/o other replies that I am not pushing you off the 0-reply list prematurely.

Although I have no experience w/ this item, it looks like a good, yea intriguing, piece of equip. I have no idea if it is worth the price.


Please don't forget that h/w redundancy is not a substitute for s/w back-ups. -- If bad data gets sent to the device, it will just wind up written on both drives & both copies will be NG. Their "a prefect backup at all times" is the one false claim I found on the page you linked to. (Not to mention the spelling mistake. )

<humor>
Someone should find the author of that paragraph & make him/her stay after school to write:
"Hardware redundancy is not a substitute for software back-ups."
on the black board 100 or 1000 times.
</humor>

The "fully hot-plug and hot swapable capabilities", however, mean that w/ one or more extra trays & drives you could make your own back-ups by periodically pulling one drive & inserting a spare -- the box would "heal" the RAID 1 array & the pulled drive would be a true back-up. You would need an extra tray & drive for each generation of back-up you wanted to maintain. You could also consider LVM snapshots or a versioning file system like ZFS.

Rick, thanks for the insight. I currently have been running a RAID 1 system for 5 yrs now with a hard drive backup system (incremental weekly, full monthly, and a remote copy at work). I've reached the 80% capacity of the drives and do not have the space to install more internal drives. Hot swap is not something I am looking for only because this is my home network and bringing down the server to replace hard drives is not an issue.

If you're already doing systematic back-up of an existing RAID array, so you didn't most of the "insight" . No matter, it may help someone else.

As for the hot plug/swap: you may not be looking for it, but if you buy this item, it will be an included feature -- one that may not cost too much extra to use.

Assuming you buy this thing, I hope you post your experiences w/ it.

I'll be sure to do that once I buy it and get it up and running. Should be straight-forward considering that the system should see it as a hard-drive enclosure. I have 2 generic ones now and it was a cinch to get those up and running.

As promised, I am here to write that I bought the ezRAID enclosure and have successfully installed it. A very pain-free install and as I suspected, the OS saw the RAID enclosure as a typical FW HD. I highly recommend getting this if you need a redundant storage solution, with only a FW 400 card, and a couple of SATA disk lying around. I have pictures and instructions on getting this installed on a Slackware 10 box on my blog. PM me if you're interested.

I think only contributing members can PM, how about a link?

Did not know that. Here you go. http://tinyurl.com/346phs

Thanks for the link. Keep us posted on any further developments.