Re: [gentoo-user] Big USB disks

[Peter Humphrey <peter@prh.myzen.co.uk>]

On Tuesday, 22 December 2020 16:48:26 GMT Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 22, 2020 at 11:36 AM Peter Humphrey <peter@prh.myzen.co.uk> 
wrote:
> > I wondered about that. I'm nervous, though, because this is my ultimate
> > backup disk, and of course I don't want to endanger it. This disk is an
> > external USB unit, not for booting from.
> 
> Oh, if you aren't booting from it then I don't think the firmware
> would be involved at all.  Only the OS should matter, so as long as
> that is something modern you should be fine (not sure how linux from
> 1998 handles a 14TB USB drive).

Er... it's 4TB, and although I didn't say so, this is the Thinkpad T61 I 
mentioned in another thread, which is having Gentoo installed. I ditched the 
Windows partitions, since there was no point in keeping a possibility of 
recovering the OS - it was XP!

So far in the new installation, Gentoo can't see any partitions. I'd better 
check through all the FS settings I have in the kernel.

> Your biggest issue is probably going to be that if you have a lot of
> data to back up then it will take forever if the system only has USB2.

Yes, that's true, but the laptop's disk is only 120 GB.

> I'm actually storing a lot of my data on USB3 external drives now with
> lizardfs.  With Pi4s having 2x USB3 hosts you can keep up to four
> spinning disks near-100% occupied, and this is mostly for static data
> so I could handle more disks than that (rebuilds are going to be
> limited by the gigabit LAN port).  I was using LSI HBAs but have been
> having SATA errors with those - I suspect that the ones you can get
> cheap on eBay have a LOT of hours on them and are getting flaky - plus
> one of those HBAs probably pulls more power than a dozen Pis anyway.
> I wouldn't do this with older Pi models due to the USB being far more
> limited (USB2 only, and the LAN was shared with that too) - there are
> other SBCs that are options as well.

Lots more interesting ideas there - thanks again Rich.

> Obviously none of this is going to be competing with block storage
> solutions on SSD/NVMe.  This is just for media/etc where capacity and
> redundancy and cheap matters most.

I only have a couple of home machines to think about, so only fairly modest 
backup is in order.

-- 
Regards,
Peter.