OT: Seagate 2TB gigabit backup drive

[Richard Kreiss]

The USB drive I had attached to my workstation for backup ran out of space
recently.  I decided to purchase a larger drive and saw A 2TB Seagate drive
advertised for $169.00.

I attached it to my Gigabit switch and installed the software which came
with it (Windows 7 64 bit).

The drive was made to appear as a new server with its own IP address.  The
software then mapped the drive to my workstation.

I then used the software to assign a fixed IP address so as to make mapping
the drive possible without the software.

This was easily done on my server with Windows Server 2003 as one could use
an IP address for mapping the drive.  Also the network option did see the
drive as a server on the network.  However, this is not true for Windows 7.

My main complaint about this drive, is the slowness of the backups or
copying files to it.  Currently I am copying an old backup file
Backup-11-26-08.bkf to the drive.  It is 35.7GB and based on the estimated
time, it will take about 19 hours to copy this file.  The data transfer rate
has settled in at about 896KB/sec.

It looks like this is a "poor man's NAS".  I need to look to purchasing a
GIGABIT NAS to handle faster file transfers and backups.



Richard Kreiss
GCC Consulting

Office: 410-653-2813