On Thursday, October 31st, 2024 at 7:00 PM, Keith Lofstrom <[email protected]> wrote:
> I want a fast, reliable two-slot SATA3 "drive toaster" > for 2.5 inch TB SSD drives. > > I am in work-fast-break-things-too-many-mistakes mode. > > Breaking installed distros on big SSD drives takes too > long to debug/repair/restore/reinstall. I'd prefer a > small pile of identical spares, and an easy way to > create more. > > I can bit-copy a 1TB Samsung EVO SATA SSD drive from > a laptop through a USB2 adapter over MANY hours. > > In theory, a full bandwidth 500MB/s drive-to-drive > copy needs less than 40 minutes to move a terabyte. > > Amazon lists many "happy-family-mixed-vegetable-brand" > dual bay drive docking stations, approximately $50 ... > > ... and all have a few bad reviews about defective > copying and source drive corruption. Perhaps those > are slanders injected by competitors. Example: > > https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0759567JT > > I'd prefer to get my reviews from trustworthy friends, > and if I squint a lot, all of you look like friends. > What desktop drive-copy appliance do you suggest? > > Keith L. > > P.S. In theory, for current tasks I only need to move > a fraction of the formatted drive capacity, but I don't > expect any "toaster-tool" to know enough about current > and future Linux file systems. > > -- > Keith Lofstrom [email protected] So, speaking as someone who did customer-facing tech support for disk imaging and backup hardware, I spent a lot of time talking to end users about the various ways to accomplish this. First up, the appliance drive copiers that you have seen are of dubious quality. They aren't necessarily that fast and if they break, you don't know what kind of replacement will be able to find. And don't bother calling those companies for tech support, you won't get any. Now, what you are trying to achieve is not unusual. Digital Cinema does this all the time, they copy 1TB drives en masse for distribution to movies theaters because it's still faster than having everyone try to download it over the net. And by "en masse", I mean THOUSANDS of copies for each movie. Each location playing a given movie gets 2 disks mailed to them. The accomplish this by using 3.5" drive bays and a carrier. https://www.cru-inc.com/industries/digital-cinema/ The "copy" action is handled by a Linux system. Yes, Linux. EXT3 is the standard format for Digital Cinema. I was specifically instructed to tell people trying to hook those devices up to Windows that "we do not support that configuration" and I thoroughly enjoyed every second of it. Unless something has changed in the years since I left, CRU has "trayless" drive bays. Meaning you can get a 2.5" SATA drive bay that replaces your DVD drive. https://www.cru-inc.com/products/removable/ Check out the list. USB is going to be slow and honestly there is no point trying to make it go fast. Now as for other concerns, verification. CRU is also one of the official vendors for digital forensics. They sell a reasonably priced writeblocker that less you read in data from a SATA HDD/SSD without any concerns that data will be written BACK to the drive. What you do here is create an image of the drive using a writeblocker and then hash it. You can then verify all the copies you make via sha256sum or your preferred method. This is what the police (usually) do when they make copies of a suspect's data for investigation in various labs. TL;DR if you do this via USB you are signing yourself up for pain. This process sucks over USB and there is no magical product you can buy to fix it. I recommend setting up a process similar to DCI. They do it that way for a reason. -Ben
