Re: [gentoo-user] Hard drive noise

[J. Roeleveld]

On Saturday, December 19, 2015 08:02:12 AM Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 19, 2015 at 5:12 AM, Thomas Mueller
>
> <mueller6726@×××××××××.net> wrote:
> > 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.
> I use a cheap external "enclosure" with a port replicator.  The
> replicator part is sometimes problematic - sometimes one drive or the
> other isn't recognized and I need to power-cycle (which means
> unmounting both drives before touching either).  But, otherwise it
> works fine, and lets me just use whatever internal drive I want.

SATA and port replicators?
I've heard that for those to be reliable, you need a SAS controller.

> I use it for a few purposes:
> 1.  Ability to plug in external drives for offline storage (vs burning
> tons of DVDs).  I had a growing collection of smaller drives I'd
> replaced anyway, and I use them in RAID1 pairs.  Reminds me that I
> should scrub them soon...

I currently use 2.5" drives in hot-swap bays myself. External enclosures means 
similar amount of work swapping them, but with the added complexity and wiring 
when using external enclosures.

> 2.  Ability to easily hot-swap for drive failures.  When I get a RAID
> failure I can plug a new drive into the enclosure as soon as I have it
> and rebuild the array, which gets me back into full redundancy sooner.
> Then at a convenient point I'll swap the drive into the internal bay.
>
> > 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.
> I suspect it is the ease-of-use factor.  USB external drives were more
> common than eSATA back when USB meant USB 2.0 and eSATA was just as
> good as it is today.  Clearly performance wasn't the deciding factor
> here.

Power from the bus? (Eg. reducing the amount of cables)

> I will say that SATA port replicators seem finicky, at least under
> Linux.  With USB it is all idiot-proof.  With SATA of any kind I end
> up figuring out how many PCI cards I can jam into my PC with as many
> ports each as possible if I want a large number of drives.  Backblaze
> uses port replicators, but they've basically tailored their hardware
> to a single purpose so they're using the motherboard+SATA+replicator
> design that is optimal for their needs.

Backblaze actually wrote about which chipsets work together.
If you stick with those, it should work.

--
Joost