Eric,
 
Thanks for your auggestions. I am guessing that I do need the speed. I originally had the backups running to internal IDE drives on a P3 500 MHz and there was not enough time at night to do all the backups. By that I mean some backups had to be rescheduled. Now, I do not profess to be a backuppc expert, and I have since read that using blowfish with ssh will speed that up, and I may have had the backuppc maintenance running at the same time as the  backups, which will slow it down. So, I have two more options to speed things up in the configuration of the softbware.
 
I have 6 LAN machines, and three remote machines on the Internet. I use backuppc with rsync over ssh. One of the LAN and one of the remote machines are servers with medium size databases, so they take time to snapshot (OODB, not msyql).
 
Instead of making this project a large research project to time everything and figure out what I need exactly (I am not being paid for this work!), I decided to spend a few more bucks on the eSata stuff since it is as fast as I can go within a reasonable budget, and then tweak the backuppc configs as needed if I run out of bandwidth. Not very scientific, but somewhat practical and a little more expensive.
 
As always, I am open to differing opinions and new ideas, so don't worry about offending me if you think I am totally missing the mark! (no pun intended).
 
Mark

On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 3:46 PM, Eric Shubert <ejs@shubes.net> wrote:
Mark Phillips wrote:
> I need to set up a backup drive(s) for several home machines. I want to
> use external Sata drives. My older P4 machine has a PCI 2.2 bus, so I
> need a recommendation for a Sata drive controller card for one or two
> external Sata 2 drives. The card has to work with Debian and backuppc.
> Also, a recommendation for 1 TB+ eSata drives.
>
> Thanks!
>
> Mark
>

Do you really need the speed for backups? You might consider using USB2
instead of eSATA. I have external backup drives configured mirrored
(with software raid-1) on USB2. It works nicely. It's not as fast as
eSATA would be, but it's adequate.

--
-Eric 'shubes'

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