The Tuesday 2004-08-10 at 13:30 -0400, Jesse L. Purdom wrote:
I was wondering if I could get some advice as to a backup solution for my laptop. I am running SuSE v8.0 Professional on a Dell Latitude CPi. What I am looking for is either a tape or CD drive that works well with SuSE v8.0 via either a serial or parallel port. This is my home system and I do not have the option of backing the data up to a network.
If anyone out there has any experience with this I would greatly appreciate their feedback.
¿Serial? ¿Parallel? Er... I hope you have lots of patience... and I mean _lots_. X'-) A serial port puts at most 115kbits/second, thats around 11 kbytes/s. A parallel port... somewhat more, depends on the exact configuration. I do have a parallel port Iomega zip drive (for "legacy" backups). Let me see, I'll time it now [...] 12856792 bytes read in 23.035 seconds, that's 545Kb/s. I can not time write speed, because it is buffered by the kernel, and it appears instantaneous, when in fact it is slower that read, of course. Assume half a megabyte per second. A 5 gigabyte backup would be... 2.8 hours, not counting the 20 zip disks I would need. But of course, Iomega has larger drives, but I wonder if they still sell them with parallel port cables. There are other makes, of course, but I mention that one because that's the one I have. Are you sure you can not use USB? Some old computers, Pentium class, started to have usb ports even if the box had no socket for it, and before there were devices to plug unto them. -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson