Hi,

I own a 1tb WesternDigital hard-disk, that kept in an USB hard-drive enclosure to connect to my laptop. It works fine so far, but as soon as I start put a little load on it, (like rsyncing 200GB) it just “stops”. It seems as if the USB controller chip just crashes, and nothing works anymore, until I switch it off and reconnect it. I’ve tried it on different PCs and different versions of Linux.

Now that I do not trust USB any longer, and since it is slow anyways, I am thinking about getting some SATA ExpressCard, and use that for external Storage, has anyone experience with that? Any recommendations? Or should I just get another USB-Enclosure, and see if that one is not broken? Or should I build a file-server and attach to it with Gigabit Ethernet? What would you do?

Cheers
-Richard

Tags Hardware, Geek Documents

3 Responses to “USB-Hardrives considered harmful”

  1. Peter Hengl Says:

    1tb???

    Have you checked if the enclosure actually supports disks of that size?

    Also: what the hell kind of data do you store on your laptop that you need to rsynch 200gb?

  2. oracle Says:

    I always keep all 4 Seasons of LEXX The Darkzone on my Laptop, for Emergencies, and some other stuff…

    Its the fucking job of the enclosure to support whatever disk I throw at it, this is not 1999 ;-) its an SATA USB Case, so its fairly new.

    Cheers
    -Richard

  3. Peter Hengl Says:

    Because you’re considering it anyways: SATA is a pretty good idea - eSATA is pretty much identical to plain ol’ SATA and in the enclosure no chip should be involved in connecting the disk (afaik). So if your rsynching works with an internal drive, it should work with an external drive als well.

    And btw I’m using an external drive via eSATA and it rocks!

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