Re: [gentoo-user] Re: USB3 external storage HD's

just remember 3.5" drives, particularly the higher perfomance/enterprise drives can require well thought out cooling, this is a primary reason you just don't see 10k drives in desktops any more (had one in a mac, factory in 2001), in most machines they'll fail in months, they just need more cooling than most cases provide or can provide.  i have a slower 3 tera hgst(7500/7800 or there abouts) (now made by one of my least favorite vendor who bought the tech from hitachi) and in my warm apartement (health problems, it hurts less when it's very warm) have mild difficulty keeping it bellow 100 deg F.  the drive is in a cage directly behind a fan mounted to the front.  if you take old machines apart you'll notice some vendors putting the drive right behind a grill on the front, positioned vertically to expose maximum area to air flow, these are slower drives but still benefit from more cooling than is "traditional", i.e. unchanged since the 90's.

External cases rarely have significant cooling (even those with fans), the old usb2 externals will all cook your' drive rapidly if you do large datatransfers, they are only passable if doing small writes, like backing up single files, not large portions of another drive (or restoring either).  The "advantage" of laptop drives, and the reason they have become popular in servers is that they are designed to be low power, and to function in a difficult thermal enviroment (it's hard to cool a laptop).  they dissipate less power per byte stored, and are of course slower which may or may not matter particularly in a raid setup or if most of you're drives can spin down most of the time, they also usually pause them selves at a preset temperature until they cool down and constantly park.  if you boot off a laptop drive it will take a long time, or if you try to move lots of files.  for archiving media it's probably not a problem, for development work or engineering use it may drive you nuts and waste you're time. 

 if you're going with external drives use laptop drives, or build a JBOD with good cooling.  in any case, monitor drive temperatures, in my experiance anything above 100F is asking for a short life, bellow or at 100F drives new and old are happy for over a decade which seems like a long time, but most of us have data on older machines with older drives somewhere in the house and most don't back that up or back it up often enough.  also note that most usb adapters don't even allow smart access, so the only way to see if the drive's hot is to feel the enclosure which is not terribly accurate or usefull.  it's also really nice to be able to run smart diagnostics and have the os monitor the smart status which most versions of linux will do, don't know about winblows, haven't run that since xp.

mad.scientist.at.large (a good madscientist)
--
God bless the rich, the greedy and the corrupt politicians they have put into office.   God bless them for helping me do the right thing by giving the rich my little pile of cash.  After all, the rich know what to do with money.


18. Jan 2018 12:22 by antlists@××××××××××××.uk:


> On 18/01/18 18:45, Nikos Chantziaras wrote:
>> On 18/01/18 20:33, >> thelma@×××××××××××.com>>  wrote:
>>> Do those External Storage work with Linux (USB3)?
>>> I don't want to install any ventor-software, I just want one that plugs
>>> and play.
>>>
>>> Any recommendations?
>>
>> My USB 3 stick works fine, at its full advertised speed (190MB/s read,
>> 100MB/s write.) So an HD should work fine though. There's no third-party
>> drivers needed.
>>
> Just don't even think of using a USB drive for RAID :-(
>
> Cheers,
> Wol