Frank Steinmetzger wrote: > Am Sun, Jul 25, 2021 at 06:10:19PM -0500 schrieb Dale: > >> I've tried external drives connected by USB before and hated them. Slow >> when they do work and buggy at that. > Theoretically, HDDs are not able to saturate USB 3. And from my observation, > I do get their maximum performance – my 2.5″ 1 TB WD delivers about 80-90 MB/s > read speed and said Intenso/Seagate 3.5″ gives me up to around 140 MB/s tops. > I used dstat to gather those numbers.
I think all my USB ports are USB2. It's slower. What you post above is about what I get on my external eSATA. If I were using USB3, things may be different. Maybe. ;-) >> I've had more drives go bad when using USB enclosures than I've ever had >> on IDE or (e)SATA. > Interesting, I can’t really confirm such a correlation from the drives I > have lying around. And I don’t see how USB can cause damage to a drive. > Except for physical impacts owing to the fact that USB drives are easily > moved around. > Those particular drives sat on the desk next to my computer. They rarely moved. Heck, I rarely unplugged them. Just turn them off when done. >> I've had two drives fail after years of service that were IDE or SATA. I >> have three drives that are bricks and all of them were in USB enclosures >> and far young to die. > Perhaps they became too hot during operation. Enclosures don’t usually > account for thermals. Didn’t you mention you lived in a hot area? > Every enclosure I buy has a fan. The enclosures were pretty well built as far as the case goes. >> I paid more for eSATA external enclosures and have had no >> problems with drives going dead yet. All of them have far surpassed the >> drives in the USB enclosures. > Hm... bad (in the sense of cheap) USB controllers on the mobo or the > enclosures? Or bad USB cables? What kind of HDD death are we talking about? > Certainly not bad sectors, right? > After a while I'd start getting errors and it would either remount ro or just unmount completely. After a while, the drives wouldn't respond at all. They spin up but it's as if they are not connected with the data cable. Eventually, I plugged them into my computer as SATA drives. They still wouldn't show up. It was as if they were not there. They did spin up tho. >> I think my drives are either Seagate or WD. I tend to stick with those >> two, unless it is a really awesome deal. > Yea. First the SMR fiasco became public and then there was some other PR > stunt they did that I can’t remember right now, and I said “I can’t buy WD > anymore”. But there is no real alternative these days. And CMR drives are > becoming ever rarer, especially in the 2.5″ realm. Except for one single > seagate model, there isn’t even a bare SATA drive above 2 TB available on > the market! Everything above that size is external USB stuff. And those > disks don’t come with standard SATA connectors anymore, but have the USB > socket soldered onto their PCB. > I bought a SMR before I was aware of the problems with them. It's just a backup drive but I still have to wait for it to stop bumping before I power it off. Sometimes it only takes a few minutes, sometimes it bumps for a while. The CMR I use as a backup drive, different data, is smaller. It doesn't do that so I can unhook it right after it finishes. >> I've never updated the firmware on a drive before. > Me neither. I think I updated an SSD once. > I've never had a SSD. Thinking about it tho. Hmmm, just realized I didn't do my usual Sunday updates and backups. Ooooops. :/ Dale :-) :-)
