[ale] recommendations on external USB drive for Linux, pls

[Greg Freemyer]

On 11/1/06, Robert Story <rstory-l at 2006.revelstone.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 1 Nov 2006 07:02:57 -0500 Jerry wrote:
> JY> I need to stage backups at a co-lo. A daily full set totals 15G or so. Tape
> JY> lib/magazine option is out for now, so an external USB drive sounds good.
>  ...
> JY>    - it needs to stay on 24x7x365 w/o overheating or burning into ashes
>
> If this is the case, I recommend against USB/Firewire, and would instead go
> with external SATA.
>
> 1) I'm pretty sure neither USB nor Firewire will let you spin down the drive
> when idle. Since this is a backup drive, that will likely be most of the time.
>
> 2) I'm very sure that neither USB nor Firewire will let you do SMART
> monitoring, so you can know when a drive is starting to fail.
>
> 3) I'm 100% positive that SATA will be faster than USB or Firewire.
> _______________________________________________

The linux 2.6 kernel sata driver is rapidly maturing, so 2.6.18 is
vastly better than 2.6.17 at error handling and 2.6.19 will have a lot
of improvements over 2.6.18.  Even more are in the devel tree and
planned for 2.6.20 inclusion

See http://linux-ata.org/driver-status.html#matrix for a 2.6.19-rc1 status.

If I were going to go with eSata I would definitely want to use a
controller that Linux supported hotplug with.  Per the matrix there
were only 4 a month ago.  2.6.20 is expected  to support a lot more.
ie. several more are supported in the current libata devel tree, but
not in mainline yet.

Greg
-- 
Greg Freemyer
The Norcross Group
Forensics for the 21st Century