Multi-bay external removable hard drive units

[adamnyc]

I have a client running Windows Small Business Server 2003 Standard Edition on a Dell Dual Xeon PowerEdge 1420SC with RAID-1 400GB drives (about 130MB currently used). We are considering the following backup solution: Retrospect 7 Small Business Standard + the Open File add-on with one of the following external multi-bay removable drive units as our backup:

 

1. Highly Reliable Systems' Removable Hard Drive Backup System connected by USB 2.0, or;

 

2. Burly 8 Bay Rackmount HotSwap eSATA Enclosure connected by eSATA cables to a TEMPO-X eSATA X8 Serial ATA PCI-X Host Controller Card with Eight External Ports w/hot-swappable support.

 

Both units use comparable Ventec EZ Swap removable hard drive racks. The Highly Reliable System uses PATA drives; the Burly, SATA or SATA II drives.

 

The plan is to install five 160GB Seagate drives on a Monday-Friday rotation. Each day, we would key-on the current day's drive and key-off the previous day's drive. In other words, only one drive would be powered on any particular day keeping the drives cooler and extending their lives. One of the offline drives would be taken off-site weekly (the client prefers not to do it daily and understand the risks).

 

The reason this client wants a mult-bay unit as opposed to a single-bay removable with swappable carriers is that he feels it would be more convenient not to have to physically remove the drives from the chassis each day. Just two key-turns daily and a once-weekly removal for off-site.

 

Can anyone see pitfalls to this setup either in backing up or restoring data?

Advantages or disadvantages of the SATA vs. the USB PATA arrangement?

 

I can see advantages to the SATA since SATA II will eventually become the prevailing hard drive standard. On the other hand, USB should be supported during disaster recovery, but will the SATA host adapter be recognized by Retrospect when booting from a recovery CD?

 

Thoughts anyone?