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

[Rich Freeman]

On Fri, Jan 19, 2018 at 8:49 AM,  <thelma@×××××××××××.com> wrote:
> On 01/19/2018 02:30 AM, Peter Humphrey wrote:
>> On Thursday, 18 January 2018 18:45:41 GMT 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.
>>
>> I've been using two bog-standard USB-3 Seagate expansion drives for a couple
>> of years. They're for whole-system backups of my Gentoo boxes, so they
>> aren't exactly heavily stressed. I haven't measured their speeds, but
>> they're much faster than the USB-2 drives I had before them.
>
> Maybe SSD would perform better, but they are not cheap.
>

Usually you want larger-scale external storage for things like
backup/archival, and those don't demand low latency.  A spinning disk
has just as much sequential transfer speed as an SSD, and that is
probably what you're using it for.

I personally use 3.5" hard drives for external storage with a USB3
"enclosure" (more like a port multiplier - the disks just stick out of
it).  USB3 can keep up with the data rates on 1-2 hard drives, and
these kinds of enclosures are dirt cheap anyway.  I find it useful for
things like archives, wiping drives, and also swapping drives (I can
swap a RAID drive with one in the enclosure easily without taking the
box apart, and then I can swap the physical drive location at my
convenience to free up the enclosure).  For archival I tend to use old
drives that I've otherwise outgrown and I just put them in RAID pairs.
Occasionally I dust them off and scrub them.  This is all just
personal data that often is in multiple places (encrypted S3, etc), so
I don't mind being casual.  Tapes would be a more rigorous solution
but at my scale the hardware is just way too expensive to justify.

-- 
Rich