Re: [gentoo-user] Big USB disks

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

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).

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.

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.

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.

-- 
Rich