Re: external hard-disk enclosure advice?
On Sat, Aug 26, 2006 at 01:44:29PM +0900, Miles Bader wrote:
> hdv@jadev.org (J.A. de Vries) writes:
> > I recently bought such a beast for backup purposes. I choose an Icy Box
> > IB-360-BL. This is an external closure for 3.5" IDE/SATA disks and
> > features both USB and Firewire interfaces. The disk itself I had to buy
> > separately, but that was exactly what I wanted.
> >
>
> Hi, thanks for the review. How's the I/O speed / CPU usage (I heard USB
> can eat a lot of CPU at high speeds)?
>
I use a couple of disks in external USB caddies to carry around a Debian
mirror or two :) I'm currently using caddies from Iomega which
originally had 160GB disks in - I think the latest caddies from them now have 300 /
320GB disks as standard.
These are strong aluminium caddies with a steel tray inside and rubber
washers providing some shock absorption round the drive fixing screws,
the end fixes with two small flat head screws and the caddies have a
robust power supply.
I've previously borrowed a caddy that would spin a largish disk but not
read from it because there wasn't enough power reserve given by the power
adaptor block. Cheap caddies really feel cheap and flimsy: try and look
at the quality before you buy.
Watch out for heat dissipation if the drives are on full time: I've run
disks for 6 hours + and the caddies get quite warm to the touch on the
outside - the disks themselves are hot to the touch if you take them
from the case.
I tend to use rsync to copy gigabytes of data across to these. I have
been noticing md5sum errors in the copied Debian archives: I _think_
this is because even after you umount the external disk, you tend to
switch it off when it's still spinning at full speed :(
> I was thinking to make this disk my "main" disk, not a backup disk, so
> I'm more concerned with that than most people probably are.
>
You may want to reconsider that and use the disk primarily as backup and
portable storage. Some motherboards won't boot readily from a USB
attached hard disk.
> [Is there such a thing as an external SATA disk? That should be much
> faster I guess, but I'm not sure offhand if disk speeds justify worrying
> about interface speed this much ... :-]
>
There are - but I haven't seen many yet.
300GB transfers fairly fast over USB 2.0 - in about 10 hours :) 480
MBit/s = 48MBytes transferred per second or so - and real life suggests
that it feels fast :)_
> Thanks,
>
> -Miles
>
HTH,
Andy
> --
> "Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture
> and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure,
> and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the
> future of the world depends." -Oscar Wilde, "The Soul of Man Under Socialism"
>
>
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