From: "Geo" 

"Frank Haber"  wrote in message
news:447c70bc$1{at}w3.nls.net...

> o Does "importing" the dynamic drive "touch" it,
so it's no longer a part
of
> the original array?  How about putting an NTFS4 drive in, say, an XP Pro
> computer?  Are there BIOS issues >137GB?

there used to be an issue with W2K updating an NTFS4 drive to NTFS5 (it was
done automagically). Since then I don't move drives to newer versions
unless I plan to keep them there.

> o Do you guys keep exact-same PATA spare drives on the shelf?  Ever hit a
> subtle drive firmware incompatibility between revs of the alleged
"same"
> drive?  Could you actually use, say, a Seagate 250 as replacement for a
failed
> Maxtor 250 and be happy?  How about a Seagate 400 - will it rebuild as a
"250"
> and run?

Never been a problem unless one is an 80gig drive and the next is a 250.
There is a registry edit for W2K and XP so that you can use over 137gig
(search nthelp.com, I forget where I put the tip).

> o If you have some standardization of boxen in your shop, is there any
point
> in keeping said spares as "hot" spares, ready to install in
a spare box?
(To
> explain: "rebuild" to a blank drive some night/weekend, then put the
original
> drive back in and keep the clone on the shelf as a hot spare, contents
only
> months old.)

If you backup to tape, the spare drives really only need to have the OS
cloned to them to be ready to go. That way they can be used to restore a
number of different machines if you use the same config on all the
machines.

> And how about spare RAID 5 HW controllers?  You guys keep spares of these?
> Same rev?

I used to, I've given up on it. Now if the machine is that critical I keep
an entire spare box ready to go. The problem I always found was that most
Raid5 stuff is so high tech it takes forever to get installed and running
if you start swapping hardware other than the drives. If you lose a
controller, restore from tape backup plan goes into operation.

Geo.

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