On Saturday, December 19, 2015 08:02:12 AM Rich Freeman wrote: > 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.
SATA and port replicators? I've heard that for those to be reliable, you need a SAS controller. > 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... I currently use 2.5" drives in hot-swap bays myself. External enclosures means similar amount of work swapping them, but with the added complexity and wiring when using external enclosures. > 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. Power from the bus? (Eg. reducing the amount of cables) > 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. Backblaze actually wrote about which chipsets work together. If you stick with those, it should work. -- Joost
