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]
