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On Sat, Dec 19, 2015 at 5:12 AM, Thomas Mueller |
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<mueller6726@×××××××××.net> wrote: |
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> |
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> Now I am considering an external hard drive with eSATA, more suitable for OS installation (Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD, Haiku?) than USB 3.0. Only brand I find is Micronet Fantom (GForce), or use Seagate NAS hard drive in an enclosure with eSATA. |
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I use a cheap external "enclosure" with a port replicator. The |
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replicator part is sometimes problematic - sometimes one drive or the |
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other isn't recognized and I need to power-cycle (which means |
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unmounting both drives before touching either). But, otherwise it |
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works fine, and lets me just use whatever internal drive I want. |
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I use it for a few purposes: |
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1. Ability to plug in external drives for offline storage (vs burning |
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tons of DVDs). I had a growing collection of smaller drives I'd |
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replaced anyway, and I use them in RAID1 pairs. Reminds me that I |
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should scrub them soon... |
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2. Ability to easily hot-swap for drive failures. When I get a RAID |
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failure I can plug a new drive into the enclosure as soon as I have it |
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and rebuild the array, which gets me back into full redundancy sooner. |
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Then at a convenient point I'll swap the drive into the internal bay. |
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> |
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> I really can't see why USB 3.0 is so more widely available than eSATA when eSATA seems superior as far as I can tell. |
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> |
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I suspect it is the ease-of-use factor. USB external drives were more |
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common than eSATA back when USB meant USB 2.0 and eSATA was just as |
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good as it is today. Clearly performance wasn't the deciding factor |
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here. |
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I will say that SATA port replicators seem finicky, at least under |
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Linux. With USB it is all idiot-proof. With SATA of any kind I end |
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up figuring out how many PCI cards I can jam into my PC with as many |
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ports each as possible if I want a large number of drives. Backblaze |
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uses port replicators, but they've basically tailored their hardware |
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to a single purpose so they're using the motherboard+SATA+replicator |
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design that is optimal for their needs. |
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-- |
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Rich |
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