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Portables Data Storage Hardware Technology

High-Capacity PCMCIA Drives for Backup? 65

Posted by Cliff from the will-technology-catch-up-with-our-data-needs dept.
jspivack asks: "My dad is looking for a very portable backup system for his laptop. He's tired of going without his apps and data for days on end when it goes down - and since it's a laptop, anything from trackpad to screen to USB port problems means sending the whole computer in for repair. I figured this would be the perfect use for a high-capacity PCMCIA hard drive: he could just keep it in his slot and make a nightly carbon-copy of his main HD. No external messiness to deal with. And if his machine goes down, he just pops out the drive and pops it into a loaner machine. The problem is, I've googled around and it would seem that Toshiba only makes PCMCIA drives in a 5GB flavor, despite the fact that they have 1.8" drives going to 60GB. Have I missed some other high-capacity (>=20Gb) -internal- PCMCIA drives (Google's not perfect, and neither am I)? Does anyone know if I could buy a 5GB PCMCIA drive and a larger 'embedded' drive and just swap the larger drive itself into the PCMCIA interface portion of the smaller drive? I know it would be taller, but both of his slots are open. Does anyone know if there are technological barriers to this hack?"
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High-Capacity PCMCIA Drives for Backup? More

High-Capacity PCMCIA Drives for Backup?

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  • Use an external drive (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 14, 2005 @04:10PM (#11936602)

    Otherwise, when they steal his laptop, they get 2 copies of the data and he'll have 0

  • Other possibilites (Score:3, Informative)

    by CMGaretJax ( 820127 ) on Monday March 14, 2005 @04:10PM (#11936604)
    Another possibility would be a very small external USB flash drive with very high capacity, for example http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/drives/5ad4/.

  • pcmcia supports IDE (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Naikrovek ( 667 ) <<jjohnson> <at> <psg.com>> on Monday March 14, 2005 @04:11PM (#11936620)
    if he's not going to take the drive anywhere, just backup nightly, I believe there are PCMCIA -> IDE adapters that can do the job.

    I know you mentioned INTERNAL drives but you'll likely pay through the nose for a drive like that.. try and find an adapter to the PCMCIA bridge and you'll have better success i think.

  • laptop drive on a usb2 external drive (Score:3, Interesting)

    by infonography ( 566403 ) on Monday March 14, 2005 @04:12PM (#11936634) Homepage
    Got one off eBay for about $15, hot swappable and very portable. I put in a 6 gig that I bought used for under $10. This one runs off the USB port so there isn't any messy power cordage.

  • Hmm (Score:4, Insightful)

    by NanoGator ( 522640 ) on Monday March 14, 2005 @04:16PM (#11936681) Homepage Journal
    Well, an alternative would be to choose a laptop brand that supports swapping of drives. My ex-boss has an IBM laptop with a removable tray that a laptop HD can be plopped into. That was one of the reasons she went with IBM: That particular external drive bay worked on most IBM brand laptops. I can also personally recommend Dell. I have an Inspiron 8200 and I have an external HD bay for it. In theory, I can buy a modern Inspiron and that bay will work on it, too. (Note: I cannot verify this, I could easily be wrong.) However, I'd just make sure my next laptop supports 2 drives. Fixed with a little screwdriver work.

    I'll be honest, though, I'm not sure you're approaching this the right way. Though that's not for me to decide (my apologies if I sound condescending) but I'd recommend using either firewire or network backup. It may not be as convenient in some ways, but there are some benefits:

    1.) A network (even wireless) backup could happen automatically and sent to a machine with ridiculous amounts of storage.

    2.) If you go with the PCMCIA solution, you risk losing the backup if you lose the machine. (i.e. stolen or dropped in water or something.) Basically, it'd be resilient against broader circumstances.

    3.) You'd be able to approach this with already available technology, and you probably wouldn't need to buy anything extra.

    Good luck. :)
    • Firewire/USB 2.0 is a potential solution. But it's not quite as neat/clean. Network could be tricky, as we're talking about mirroring the whole thing - he wants to back up applications (which are a paain in the neck to reinstall) as well as data. That's a lot of data. If he were running OS X, I'd tell him to just install his apps into /User/Applications and back up /User, but this is WIndows and it's just not that simple...

      • Re:Hmm (Score:2)

        by Bishop ( 4500 )
        Ghost is inexpensive and can be used to easily make backup images of the complete drive.

        • Re:Hmm (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Glonoinha ( 587375 )
          How about Ghost the entire drive with everything installed, then make backups of his My Documents directory to a 1G USB thumbdrive. He keeps it in his pocket or drawer when he isn't doing a backup (takes care of separating the backup from the machine) and it is a no-brainer to keep his backup fresh. The 1G USB thumbdrives are cheap enough to get a few to rotate between backups for keeping a few versions in case he backs up a corrupt version of a file over a good version.
      • " If he were running OS X, I'd tell him to just install his apps into /User/Applications and back up /User, but this is WIndows and it's just not that simple..."

        You're right. Thanks to Windows and it's stupid Registry, it's not so easy to back up the apps. At that point, it depends on the Apps. You'll never get Office to do this (that I know of...) but I do have my own setup like this. I have a drive letter that stays the same no matter what machine I'm on. If I move to a new machine, I create that d
    • I have a fairly ancient thinkpad (233 Mhz) but I _love_ that feature, which I call "warm swappable" since you can swap them so fast the drive will still be quite warm. Hibernate, swap, wake from hibernation - it's dualbooting without messy partitioning. I suppose I should really just put a single bigger drive in there, but still.
    • "In theory, I can buy a modern Inspiron and that bay will work on it, too"

      Unfortunately not. The I8200 was the last of what Dell calls their "C series" laptops. They're now on the "D series". As far as I know, all machines within the D-series (Examples are I8500, I8600) are bay-compatible with each other, but not the old C-series. New drive carriers cost only around $10 though. Which reminds me I need to order one. Just got a new 80gig drive and I want to put the old drive into a bay.

      Note that Dell

  • Dude ... It's the first link... (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Every-other story on Slashdot is about Google.
    Why not search there instead of asking here?

    Google Search [google.com]
  • Another possibility; buy an 'embedded' drive and use the PCMCIA slot for Firewire/USB2 and use that to hook up and back up the laptop.

    Embedded 60gb drives are cheaper than standalone 5gb drives aren't they?

  • Dunno Bout Implementation of this ... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DA-MAN ( 17442 ) on Monday March 14, 2005 @04:27PM (#11936811) Homepage
    he could just keep it in his slot and make a nightly carbon-copy of his main HD

    Unless the machine was identical, putting this carbon copy onto another machine will be painful. The 2k/XP HAL make it hard since it zeros in on all hardware and doesn't recover from major changes very well. Not a problem to restore once you get the machine back, but if the problem was software you are back to square one.

    No external messiness to deal with. And if his machine goes down, he just pops out the drive and pops it into a loaner machine.

    Not true for anything but plain old documents. Any software installed (I'm assuming this is Windows) will probably not run off of an external drive without reinstallation due to DLL installations and registry changes that happen during the install. If you Ghost the machine off of the external HD then you are screwed unless the loaner is identical. Even then, the owner might object to this.

    In addition, as you've described, finding a capacity drive bigger than 5g is damn near impossible. Your best bet is to just use an external solution. An external laptop hd via usb would do just fine.
    • Unless the machine was identical, putting this carbon copy onto another machine will be painful."

      True, but he would at least have his data files (and in the same place as he's used to, mostly), and would feel comfortable wiping/shredding his disk (if possible) before sending the laptop in for repair. Get the new/fixed unit back, drop the image on in the other direction, and he not only has all his apps, settings, etc. back but he also has a current copy of his work.
      • That would be exceptionally dumb. It's already blown up once and you've spent a ton of time fixing it by installing new drivers (and re-activating, probably).... so by copying an image back you'll just do it AGAIN. And God only knows what kind of registry damage you'll be doing. The machine might never really run right again, at least until it has a fresh OS install.

        Instead, restore the original networked image and just copy the newer, changed files over from the loaner. You still have go through the

  • Network backup? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nekoniku ( 183821 ) <justicek@infEINS ... minus physicist> on Monday March 14, 2005 @04:28PM (#11936833) Homepage
    If your dad has network access from the laptop -- and even better, wireless access that's available all the time -- you could hang one of these network storage puppies [linksys.com] off the local network and use it to do one master backup and then deltas periodically. The Linksys unit comes with backup software that supposedly will do this very thing.

  • ipod (Score:5, Interesting)

    by spooky_nerd ( 646914 ) on Monday March 14, 2005 @04:45PM (#11937047)
    Why not use an ipod? Yes, it is external, but you have a 20 or 40 GB hard drive for backing up data, and you can listen to music.

  • Use USB2/Firewire if at all possible (Score:5, Informative)

    by Elektrance ( 310019 ) on Monday March 14, 2005 @04:52PM (#11937123)
    I was looking into similar products for a project at work, and we settled on CMS Backup Solutions [cmsproducts.com] They have both PCMCIA, Firewire and USB drives, in varying capacities. If you look at their page, you'll notice that the PCMCIA drive is 75Mbps. This is not a limitation of the drive, but of the PCMCIA standard. We were using Ghost to clone the entire drive to these devices, which can take up to 10 hours on PCMCIA, but under 2 on USB2 (480Mbps). The CMS drives come with backup software as well, however I cannot give you any details on how it works, as we had already decided to go with Norton Ghost.

    As well, as others have mentioned, you can get a removable drive for the laptop itself. This is definately the fastest method (800Mbps). I have used these on compaq laptops, they hold a normal laptop HD, and you just swap it into the expansion slot when you need it.
  • Why not go with a 30-60GB ipod photo? You aren't going to find a mobile device with this amount of storage that's much smaller. Plus he can rip all those old Stones albums.

  • PCMCIA Mods (Score:3, Informative)

    by UndyingShadow ( 867720 ) on Monday March 14, 2005 @04:57PM (#11937181)
    As someone who once tried to take apart a legacy PCMCIA card to fix (we couldn't find another to order) let me advise you against trying to buy a PCMCIA Hdd and swaping out its internal drive for a larger one. I'd try an external USB drive or a flash drive.
  • As has already been noted, if the loan machine isn't identical, a drive image might not be a lot of use.

    Why not concentrate on getting the stuff he REALLY couldn't do without onto a backup (I'm guessing, but probably email, documents and the data for one or two applications), along with practicing what to do with the backups when his PC goes back to get repaired? Unless he's into video in a big way, the chances are that "all the data that he can't live without" isn't that huge - maybe less than a DVD.
  • Maybe a combination of techniques would work -
    Use an external USB drive backed up once a week or so, and combine that with the internal PCMCIA drive making delta backups...
    That way you could have a complete snapshot no older than 1 week old, and still maintain a current backup too.

    Also, try arranging the drive to facilitate this. Partition the drive so that all the programs are on the C: partition, and all data is stored on a D: partition. That way, you can ghost the C: partition for your applications, and
  • He's tired of going without his apps and data for days on end when it goes down - and since it's a laptop, anything from trackpad to screen to USB port problems means sending the whole computer in for repair.

    How often does this thing die? Is it really that much of an issue?

    Yes, laptops die, but if it's the same make/model repeatedly, maybe a different one is in order.

    As always, back up your docs/personal files elsewhere.

    • It dies about twice a year. He changes machines every 2-3 years (generally IBM), and it's never the same problem twice (unlike my brother, who has a Dell and in three years has replaced the mobo 3 times and the HDD 3 times...)

      His docs/data are backed up via the office network; it's reinstalling all the apps that we're trying to get around.

  • get a laptop with 2 hard drives in raid-1,
    and never worry about backup again.
  • Last year at NAB [nabshow.com], Panasonic showed off its new 'P2 [panasonic.co.jp]' camera system which records on what seem to be PCMCIA cards. From what I remember, they planned to have 32 or 64 GB drives when they finally release the full product (September 2006 according to this article [camcorderinfo.com]).

  • Madness (Score:5, Informative)

    by Monkelectric ( 546685 ) <slashdot@nOSpAm.monkelectric.com> on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @12:48AM (#11940885)
    This is pretty close to madness. One of the first thing you learn as a consultant is to not let the CUSTOMER tell you what they need -- theyre almost always wrong (and so are you). :)

    If you *have* to have a hotswappable HD ready to go. Buy him a USB or Firewire external case and put a laptop HD in it, get a copy of ghost and ghost the machine to the new HD every night. This solution *sucks*. And im not sure ghost supports USB/Firewire HDs?

    If your dad is likely to come home most nights, convince him he needs to keep ALL his work files in a single directory (My Documents is ideal for this). Grab a copy of Unison [upenn.edu] and sync the data back to a home machine each night over the network. Its pretty efficent as unison will only send back files that have changed. If his HD dies at some point -- goto best buy and buy a new laptop drive which you were going to have to do ANYWAYS for your hot swap plan. This plan is great if: your dad comes home often, you have enough HD space to back up his documents (delete some porn if you dont). AND e is not constnatly creating huge files (GB size).

    This is what I do to backup my laptop -- I have about 5Gb of documents, and never more then 10 megs gets changed at once. I even have a 4gb virtual machine I backup now (in addition to the 5gbs), and that takes like 10 mins.

    • Oh, I also meant to make another solution ...

      If neither of these are very good solutions, buy an external USB/Firewire drive and use unisyn to sync stuff TO the drive. Should be nice n speedy.

  • If your laptop suffers hardware failures on such a regular basis, perhaps it's time to get a new laptop? Perhaps even from a different manufacturer. The prices are so low these days, it might even cost you less than a PCMCIA drive.
  • I've used an external PCMCIA-IDE interface to externally mount laptop drives of various sizes. The 5g limit is probably just a factor of the design age of pcmcia interfaced drives.

    I was doing backups with dd, gzip and netcat, and it was awfully slow. My recollection is that it was the PCMCIA interface itself that was the limiting factor.
  • Why not external via PCMCIA card? There are SCSI cards which you can use with a SDLT320 (160GB per tape, more with compression depending on your data). There are SATA cards, so you could hang a couple of 200GB SATA drives off it and run at a decent speed for not a great deal of cash outlay. Then there's the firewire and USB options. All this assumes that you don't mind carting another box around with your laptop.

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