Motherboards with Built on board USB ports

[cpjitservices]

Hi all,

 

I have been building a few machines lately which have had onboard USB ports. I've come up with this idea whereby you could leave a USB thumb drive in that port and use it as a recovery zone. For example in Acronis you can set the safe zone to live on the USB stick and on boot up you will be presented with the 'Press F11 for system recovery option', the USB stick will have a backup image of the machine. You 'could' even put a ghost image on that drive to rollback to I guess.

 

Handy.

[unixman_again]

I used to run Netgear ReadyNAS and the o/s was on a USB stick inside the box.

[cpjitservices]

We have Dell R510's/610s and 710s with Internal USB ports, might make an internal recovery drive.

[Arthur]

I've come up with this idea whereby you could leave a USB thumb drive in that port and use it as a recovery zone.

Wouldn't it be tricky to update all of the images stored on the flash drives compared to if you had a single image stored on the network?

[cpjitservices]

Wouldn't it be tricky to update all of the images stored on the flash drives compared to if you had a single image stored on the network?

 

No, with Acronis it can be scheduled. When/If the disk gets full it will just delete the old backup and start a new one.

 

Just playing with this now, you could use to put safe zone on an external disk but seems thats not the case on the latest version, I was hoping for safe zone to be activated from a usb by pressing F11 on bootup. Then recover the image form the Secure Zone. Not so lol.

[mrwoberts]

I wonder which is likely to fail first, the USB or the internal disk (hdd/ssd). Nice idea, but I'd probably stick the recovery partition on the same disk. I know that defeats the purpose of recovering from a disk failure, but in situations where that is essential, I would install a second ssd inside for backup/restore-only.

 

Incidentally, I've had some USB drives that get really warm when left in for long periods of time; probably just dodgy usb drives though.

[cpjitservices]

I wonder which is likely to fail first, the USB or the internal disk (hdd/ssd). Nice idea, but I'd probably stick the recovery partition on the same disk. I know that defeats the purpose of recovering from a disk failure, but in situations where that is essential, I would install a second ssd inside for backup/restore-only.

 

Incidentally, I've had some USB drives that get really warm when left in for long periods of time; probably just dodgy usb drives though.

 

Im more thinking about this from our end client point of view to be honest. Alot of desktops now have this port on board. Usually these machines are single drive. Having a USB recovery environment might not be a bad idea in that sense. Password protected of course. Acronis can do this, put the SZ on the main drive - F11 to start recovery manager. Restore an image. Problem is though if the hard drive fails.

[mrwoberts]

If uptime is essential, would you consider RAID ?

[Arthur]

Problem is though if the hard drive fails.

Press F12 to PXE boot then restore the image using MDT or SCCM?

[cpjitservices]

Press F12 to PXE boot then restore the image using MDT or SCCM?

 

We dont have that sort of solution at all of our client sites, we manage companies some of them are small. Servers are not always on site to use WDS/MDT etc.

 

Yes RAID is ideal in servers, but not on desktops.

[mrwoberts]

Yes RAID is ideal in servers, but not on desktops.

 

I guess that depends on how important uptime is. RAID isn't a server specific technology, but as you say, it is used less in desktop environments.

There are a number of ways to recover, but they all hinge on the weakest link. The server aspect adds a weight of reliability that you'd have to be very resourceful to imitate - sounds like you've got something that suites your needs. Thanks for sharing; I'm always interested in hearing about these kinds of solutions.

[cpjitservices]

I guess that depends on how important uptime is. RAID isn't a server specific technology, but as you say, it is used less in desktop environments.

There are a number of ways to recover, but they all hinge on the weakest link. The server aspect adds a weight of reliability that you'd have to be very resourceful to imitate - sounds like you've got something that suites your needs. Thanks for sharing; I'm always interested in hearing about these kinds of solutions.

 

We have large companies in which we use SCCM/MDT etc etc. Just our smaller companies that we manage dont have this sort of functionality. We do have Acronis which the Secure Zone idea came from but thats not going to work.