Re: Things I don't touch with a 3.048m barge pole: USB storage (Was Re: Unidentified subject!)
On Thu, Feb 8, 2024 at 11:57 AM Ralph Aichinger <ra@h5.or.at> wrote:
>
> On Thu, 2024-02-08 at 15:36 +0000, Andy Smith wrote:
> > USB storage is for phones and cameras etc, not for serious
> > computing. Many people will disagree with that statement and say
> > they use it all the time and it is fine.
>
> I am clearly in the latter camp. This mail is delivered via a Raspberry
> Pi 4 that has a 500G USB SSD. Before the Pi4 I used a Pi3 and a Pi2 (I
> think) with USB disks (first rotating, then SSD). Probably for 5 years
> or so. Never had a problem (unlike with the SD cards I used before, SD
> cards always died on me from to many writes after a few months).
>
> > They will keep saying that
> > until it isn't fine, and then they'll be in a world of hurt.
>
> This is the same with any hard disk or SSD. If you buy the most
> expensive "enterprise" disk, with SAS or whatever, it still can
> break on the next day, taking all your data with you.
>
> Actually with USB disks, sometimes you can remove the USB
> controller, replace it in case of breakage, giving you more
> or less the same reliability as any "normal" disk.
> I've never had USB controllers break, though, so I do not
> care. I just take backups as with any other disk.
>
> > I learned not to go there a long time ago and have seen plenty of
> > reminders along the way from others' misfortunes to not ever go
> > there again myself.
>
> How does a breaking USB disk differ from a breaking SATA disk?
I may be mistaken, but I believe AS is talking about USB thumb drives,
SDcards and the like. I don't think he's talking about external SSD's
and NVME's over USB. But I don't want to put words in his mouth.
My experience with SDcards and thumb drives is along the lines of
AS's. I own a lot of dev boards (dating back to the early 2010's) for
testing, and I could go through a storage device, like an SDcard, in
about 6 months. But I would also add a swap file to the installation
because the dev boards were so resource constrained. You simply can't
run a C++ compiler on a Beagleboard with 256MB of RAM. The swap file,
even with a low swappiness, would eat up SDcards and thumb drives.
Jeff
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