Hi all,
Am 08.02.2024 um 21:38 schrieb Andy Smith:
Hello,
On Thu, Feb 08, 2024 at 05:40:54PM +0100, Ralph Aichinger wrote:
On Thu, 2024-02-08 at 15:36 +0000, Andy Smith wrote:
I learned not to go there a long time ago and have seen plenty of
reminders along the way from others' misfortunes to not ever go
there again myself.
How does a breaking USB disk differ from a breaking SATA disk?
My own experience is that it's often harder to notice and diagnose --
because on top of the actual storage and its "native" interface such as
SATA or NVMe/PCIe, you have the whole stack of USB things.
And misbehaving USB devices usually result in first working on the USB
end -- try different port, port directly on mainboard, or a powered hub,
watch out for native USB 3 or 3.0 Gen 1 -- we can see this on this
mailing list, too.
Then, USB storage is usually a single device single, if it breaks, it's
data is lost, whereas SATA/SAS/NVMe can more easily be integrated into
redundancy providing systems.
On top of all that, my own, admittedly anecdotal, experience is that
USB/Firewire-to-IDE/SATA adapters and their power supplies are more
fragile than actual disks. Most of the external hard disks I ever used
have been replaced because of their enclosures or power supplies failing.
So, I tend to agree with Andy, and I also don't notice any moving
goalposts in his statements...
In my experience it happens more often and also brings with it
frequent issues of poor performance and other reliability issues
like just dropping off the USB bus. There is almost always a better
way.
For home users / small office environments, that leaves the problem of
how to do backups -- USB drives are the most appealing storage system
for such purposes, but also seem to be less reliable than the primary
storage. What do you do? Throw more of the USB disks onto the problem?
Or is "public" cloud the solution?
Whatever you do, even purely personal storage requirements become a bit
of a nightmare when you start thinking about how to make sure your
photos and videos are around when your kids are grown up...
Cheers,
Arno
Thanks,
Andy
--
Arno Lehmann
IT-Service Lehmann
Sandstr. 6, 49080 Osnabrück
