What are the Magnetic disk drives
Large Floppy Disk Drives: These would include the Zip100, Zip250, SyQuest EZ-135, the LS-120 floppy drive and others. These devices are ideal for file archiving and transferring, but not as suitable for backup. As hard disks increase in size trying to do backups to a device, that is only a little more than 100 MB becomes impractical and expensive. These drives are very reliable although they are proprietary and not very universal. Their performance is increasingly getting better.
Removable Hard Drives: These includes devices such as Iomega's Jazz drive, SyQuest's SyJet or the mounting of an external rack and carrier containing a hard drive. While Jazz and SyJet drives can be quite expensive with capacities 500 MB to 2 GB, removable hard drives may be the best backup alternative. A disk copying software tool or simple batch file running in a task scheduler allows for unattended backup. If both drives are removable and configured properly, recovering from a disaster may be a simple as switching drives. Server software such as Microsoft Windows NT allows you to mirror drives. Should the primary drive fail with this utility you are able to remove it then reboot to the secondary drive as if nothing happened. Reliability and performance with removable hard drives is excellent while the drives themselves are non-proprietary. The cost associated with two removable hard drives is no more than a tape drive with the same capacity.
Dual Hard Drives: Having two hard drives in one computer works much the same way as a removable hard drive system. The drawbacks of this sort of scheme, however are more significant. First, it is not going to help much against theft, fire, sabotage, many types of viruses, and even some types of hardware failure. Second, you can only have a single backup, which makes the whole system very vulnerable--if you make a copy of the whole disk every night, what happens if you only notice a problem three days after it wipes out some of your data? Finally, the temptation is great to use the second drive for more data and discontinue the backup procedure when the first disk gets filled up.
RAID: RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) is a method of combining several hard drives into one unit. It can offer fault tolerance and higher throughput levels than a single hard drive or group of independent hard drives. RAID provides real-time data recovery when a hard drive fails, increasing system uptime and network availability while protecting against loss of data. Multiple drives working together also increase system performance.
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