Whatever, use what you like, but...
Have no idea, haven't used a tape in a LONG time.
Kludgy, but not impossible.
Bullshit.
Hmm... Ah, nevermind.
Shill.
I'll go over to my Linux box & install it right now.
This is what I do. There exist multi-bay racks for bare SATA drives, usually three SATA drives fitting into two half-height 5 1/4" bays. Or, if you want to play this way, two 2.5" SATAs into one 3 1/2" bay. Smaller laptop drives are ridiculously cheap these days. I normally use a 30 gig or so partition on the boot drive, and a monster drive for data. The third slot is used for image backups on a stack of backup drives.
You can do the same with IDE drives, which I was doing previously, but they rely on a sled and bay arrangement, none of which are standards. So you end up buying as many sets as you have drives. Can get expensive unless you get them used. Usually the sled to bay connector is what gives up, along with the midget fans they use.
Acronis takes about 5 minutes to backup the boot drive this way, makes for fast and more frequent backups. If a boot drive dies, I just pop in the latest backup and soldier on.
This works for other operating systems and other versions of Windows as well. I don't like dual-boot software arrangements on principle, I still remember booting up NT 4 on a dual boot machine once and having it nail 3 other drives on the system. Took the better part of a week to get the system restored. They usually work, until the boot sector or boot driver gets munged, then you have a real fun time restoring.
I've also uised VirtualBox off off virtualbox.org, this is head and shoulders above anything MS is giving away. It allows USB access and shared folders between the virtual machine and the host. Good for testing boot images before burning onto CD/DVD. However, it probably won't allow direct hardware access as the O.P. wants. A dedicated box is probably the simpler route. If access between boxes is needed, ethernet hubs are cheap.
Stan
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