On Sat, Aug 26, 2006 at 01:44:29PM +0900, Miles Bader wrote:
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] (J.A. de Vries) writes:
> > I recently bought such a beast for backup purposes. I choose an Icy Box
> > IB-360-BL. This is an external closure for 3.5" IDE/SATA disks and
> > features both USB and Firewire interfaces. The disk itself I had to buy
> > separately, but that was exactly what I wanted. 
> >
> 
> Hi, thanks for the review.  How's the I/O speed / CPU usage (I heard USB
> can eat a lot of CPU at high speeds)?
> 
I use a couple of disks in external USB caddies to carry around a Debian 
mirror or two :) I'm currently using caddies from Iomega which 
originally had 160GB disks in - I think the latest caddies from them now have 
300 /
320GB disks as standard.

These are strong aluminium caddies with a steel tray inside and rubber 
washers providing some shock absorption round the drive fixing screws, 
the end fixes with two small flat head screws and the caddies have a 
robust power supply. 

I've previously borrowed a caddy that would spin a largish disk but not 
read from it because there wasn't enough power reserve given by the power 
adaptor block. Cheap caddies really feel cheap and flimsy: try and look
at the quality before you buy.

Watch out for heat dissipation if the drives are on full time: I've run
disks for 6 hours + and the caddies get quite warm to the touch on the 
outside - the disks themselves are hot to the touch if you take them 
from the case.

I tend to use rsync to copy gigabytes of data across to these. I have 
been noticing md5sum errors in the copied Debian archives: I _think_ 
this is because even after you umount the external disk, you tend to 
switch it off when it's still spinning at full speed :(

> I was thinking to make this disk my "main" disk, not a backup disk, so
> I'm more concerned with that than most people probably are.
> 
You may want to reconsider that and use the disk primarily as backup and 
portable storage. Some motherboards won't boot readily from a USB 
attached hard disk.

> [Is there such a thing as an external SATA disk?  That should be much
> faster I guess, but I'm not sure offhand if disk speeds justify worrying
> about interface speed this much ... :-]
> 
There are - but I haven't seen many yet.

300GB transfers fairly fast over USB 2.0 - in about 10 hours :) 480 
MBit/s = 48MBytes transferred per second or so - and real life suggests 
that it feels fast :)_

> Thanks,
> 
> -Miles
> 
HTH,

Andy
> -- 
> "Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture
> and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure,
> and demoralizing.  On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the
> future of the world depends." -Oscar Wilde, "The Soul of Man Under Socialism"
> 
> 
> -- 
> To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] 
> with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]


-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] 
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Reply via email to