On Sat, Dec 19, 2015 at 5:12 AM, Thomas Mueller <mueller6...@bellsouth.net> wrote: > > Now I am considering an external hard drive with eSATA, more suitable for OS > installation (Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD, Haiku?) than USB 3.0. Only brand I > find is Micronet Fantom (GForce), or use Seagate NAS hard drive in an > enclosure with eSATA.
I use a cheap external "enclosure" with a port replicator. The replicator part is sometimes problematic - sometimes one drive or the other isn't recognized and I need to power-cycle (which means unmounting both drives before touching either). But, otherwise it works fine, and lets me just use whatever internal drive I want. I use it for a few purposes: 1. Ability to plug in external drives for offline storage (vs burning tons of DVDs). I had a growing collection of smaller drives I'd replaced anyway, and I use them in RAID1 pairs. Reminds me that I should scrub them soon... 2. Ability to easily hot-swap for drive failures. When I get a RAID failure I can plug a new drive into the enclosure as soon as I have it and rebuild the array, which gets me back into full redundancy sooner. Then at a convenient point I'll swap the drive into the internal bay. > > I really can't see why USB 3.0 is so more widely available than eSATA when > eSATA seems superior as far as I can tell. > I suspect it is the ease-of-use factor. USB external drives were more common than eSATA back when USB meant USB 2.0 and eSATA was just as good as it is today. Clearly performance wasn't the deciding factor here. I will say that SATA port replicators seem finicky, at least under Linux. With USB it is all idiot-proof. With SATA of any kind I end up figuring out how many PCI cards I can jam into my PC with as many ports each as possible if I want a large number of drives. Backblaze uses port replicators, but they've basically tailored their hardware to a single purpose so they're using the motherboard+SATA+replicator design that is optimal for their needs. -- Rich
