[Pc_Support] a new hard drive. so...

[Bryan J. Smith]

Tommy Foster wrote:
> I just got a 250 gig Hitachi hard drive ...
> This drive will be for backups, mostly (maybe exclusively).

Just remember that with 3.5" commodity disk drives, you should keep
them spindled regularly and do your best to avoid shock.  2.5"
notebook and 3.5" enterprise disk drives can take more downtime and
uptime, as well as shock (especially 2.5").

> I was going to stick it in one of those usb external drive enclosures.

You can pretty much find enclosures these days with both FireWire and
USB.  FireWire has many advantages, not only in reliability but the
fact that you don't have to "hunt" to guarantee you have an EHCI port
for full speed USB (only about 1 out of every 3-5 ports is EHCI).

But better yet now, SATA is also becoming more available in external
enclosures.  That gives you more options and far, far _superior_
performance.  Simple bracket internal-to-external adapters are under
$10.  Is the drive SATA or ATA?

> If I do, is there anything particularly wrong with having one xfs partition on it?

Other than the fact that Windows can't read it, no, I don't see
anything.  But I haven't tested XFS with regular disconnects which
could happen with an external device -- especially USB.

> I also have an extra box.  I could put a minimal os on the drive (would I even need
> swap space?) and one huge directory named Twinkle Toes, or something.  Writing to
> the enclosure would be slow; rsyncing to the extra box would be much faster.

It also gives you the advantage of being able to access it from any
OS.  That's why the 1-drive NAS appliances are getting popular versus
external drives.

I haven't done research but when I get time I'm going to start
investigating all the cheap 1-drive NAS appliances out there, which
ones could be flashed with a custom Linux version in EEPROM, or
possibly just use the drive to store the OS (less ideal), etc...

There's gotta be several projects out there to take advantage of these
sub-$100 ARM/XScale, PowerPC, etc... driven enclosures.  I just
haven't researched them.  I'm starting to like their portable nature
after messing with a Synology DS-106 recently (a $279 unit, price w/o
hard drive -- not one of the cheaper ones) and desiring more
flexibility (especially SFTP access -- the Synology at least offers
FTP-SSL/TLS).

> I'm talking myself into using the extra box. any hints, warnings, ideas?
> How about ten gigs for os + swap, and the rest for Twinkle Toes?

LVM always makes resizing easy.

> Or should I use the enclosure?  what do you think?

If you have an extra box, go for it.  One of my 3Ware Escalade 6410
(older 4-channel ATA RAID-10) card finally went belly up after over 5
years (it regularly doesn't boot) in my dedicated home LAN backup
server.