On Fri, Jan 19, 2018 at 8:49 AM, <the...@sys-concept.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, the...@sys-concept.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
