Re: External USB hard drive

Harold Weissman <HaroldW22@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
I wonder if people who have used such hardware under Linux could
contribute their experiences? I am interested in performance

The transfer rate is limited to about 30MB/s (if you get a fast
USB/IDE interface, there are also slower ones around), otherwise the
performance is the same as for internal drives.

reliability,

No problems in my experience.

mostly, but also on setup simplicity.

They are very simple to set up. Plug them in, turn them on, mount
them (or you can automount them through hotplug or on-demand). Oh,
partition and format them the first time.

In particular, would
using such a hard drive be an appropriate medium for backups?

Yes. I am using them for this purpose.

I would be
interested for the drive to be active only when the backup is being
performed; I understand that these drives can be configured so that they
stop spinning after they have not been accessed for some time.

IDE drives can be configured to do that, but IME they are configured
by default not to spin down, and you cannot tell them to spin down
with "hdparm -S ..." through the USB interface.

However, if you want to use them as a backup medium, I would recommend
to remove them anyway while not backing up, for several reasons:

- You should store the backups as far away from the main storage as
practical, for increase safety against localized disasters (e.g.,
fire, theft).

- You don't want all the backup disks to be on-line when a cracker
breaks in and trashes all the hard disks he can reach.

- anton
--
M. Anton Ertl Some things have to be seen to be believed
anton@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Most things have to be believed to be seen
http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/home.html
.

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