On Tuesday, 22 December 2020 16:48:26 GMT Rich Freeman wrote: > On Tue, Dec 22, 2020 at 11:36 AM Peter Humphrey <[email protected]> wrote: > > I wondered about that. I'm nervous, though, because this is my ultimate > > backup disk, and of course I don't want to endanger it. This disk is an > > external USB unit, not for booting from. > > Oh, if you aren't booting from it then I don't think the firmware > would be involved at all. Only the OS should matter, so as long as > that is something modern you should be fine (not sure how linux from > 1998 handles a 14TB USB drive).
Er... it's 4TB, and although I didn't say so, this is the Thinkpad T61 I mentioned in another thread, which is having Gentoo installed. I ditched the Windows partitions, since there was no point in keeping a possibility of recovering the OS - it was XP! So far in the new installation, Gentoo can't see any partitions. I'd better check through all the FS settings I have in the kernel. > Your biggest issue is probably going to be that if you have a lot of > data to back up then it will take forever if the system only has USB2. Yes, that's true, but the laptop's disk is only 120 GB. > I'm actually storing a lot of my data on USB3 external drives now with > lizardfs. With Pi4s having 2x USB3 hosts you can keep up to four > spinning disks near-100% occupied, and this is mostly for static data > so I could handle more disks than that (rebuilds are going to be > limited by the gigabit LAN port). I was using LSI HBAs but have been > having SATA errors with those - I suspect that the ones you can get > cheap on eBay have a LOT of hours on them and are getting flaky - plus > one of those HBAs probably pulls more power than a dozen Pis anyway. > I wouldn't do this with older Pi models due to the USB being far more > limited (USB2 only, and the LAN was shared with that too) - there are > other SBCs that are options as well. Lots more interesting ideas there - thanks again Rich. > Obviously none of this is going to be competing with block storage > solutions on SSD/NVMe. This is just for media/etc where capacity and > redundancy and cheap matters most. I only have a couple of home machines to think about, so only fairly modest backup is in order. -- Regards, Peter.
