Installing on HDD inside external USB enclosure

Hello,

My DockStar should be arriving today and I'm thinking about first trying it with a conventional hard drive installed inside of an old AirLink101 USB enclosure instead of using a flash drive. Has anyone else done this? Can anyone foresee issues with it? Will read/write speeds be prohibitively slow?

Thanks,
rawsted

Besides access times, a hdd is usually faster than a USB stick. But both will be limited to the max. USB 2.0 transfer rates of around 25-30MB/s. Then again the file system on the hdd will matter. As long as you use a linux file system (preferrebly EXT2/3/4; EXT2 for /boot, IIRC, due to uboot), there should be no problem.
Go ahead and try it. I'm sure other people did so already I don't know why it shouldn't work.

I am using one 1.8" HDD. No problem at all.

What about sleep/spin-down? When I used to use this thing as a backup device, it would spin down after being idle for a bit.

Or will it never be an issue because of the swap partition?



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 06/23/2011 12:45PM by rawsted.

I think you can let it spin down and even tried once. You can fine information from this board or on the web in general. I don't remember how reliable it is when I did this. However, the power saving by spin down is minimal for 2.5' or 1.8' drives. It will probably have negative rather than positive impact to the drive life span. I no longer use it any more.

Just to be clear, I'm talking about a full 3.5" HDD (IDE) inside of an old USB enclosure. Not a Segate Go drive.

rawsted Wrote:
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> Just to be clear, I'm talking about a full 3.5"
> HDD (IDE) inside of an old USB enclosure. Not a
> Segate Go drive.

Has the drive been used somewhere else? Any IDE drive would have to be 4~5 years old by now. Wonder how much life is left.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/24/2011 12:45AM by funtoy1001.

The real benefit to using a flash drive over a platter drive is the lack of moving parts. Each have their pros and cons. There's not really anything that will preclude you from using a hard drive in a USB enclosure.

rat Wrote:
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> The real benefit to using a flash drive over a
> platter drive is the lack of moving parts. Each
> have their pros and cons. There's not really
> anything that will preclude you from using a hard
> drive in a USB enclosure.

True. However, what do you think about the limited write cycles of flash drives?

Just because a drive must be a few years old doesn't necessarily mean that it will fail soon. It all depends.

And spindown is not a really big problem. What kills drives faster than usual are short sequencies of the drive spinning down just to be awakened from idle shortly after that. That's because the motor doesn't really like to be treated with the high current pulse needed to spin it up again. In general spindown will save you more power on old drives anyway, because these most likely need more power when running, compared to todays drives.

And here's a link to a useful tool when it comes to making the hdd idle:
http://hd-idle.sourceforge.net/

ingmar_k Wrote:
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> Just because a drive must be a few years old
> doesn't necessarily mean that it will fail soon.
> It all depends.
>
True. Just because the drive is old doesn't not mean it will fail soon. Except OP is putting an older drive in an enclosure will stress it more than if a newer drive. Older IDE drives tend to use more power (7200RPM, older electronic) than the newer drives and typical USB enclosure doesn't have any fan or anything to get rid of the heat from the drive.

funtoy1001 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> ingmar_k Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
> > Just because a drive must be a few years old
> > doesn't necessarily mean that it will fail
> soon.
> > It all depends.
> >
> True. Just because the drive is old doesn't not
> mean it will fail soon. Except OP is putting an
> older drive in an enclosure will stress it more
> than if a newer drive. Older IDE drives tend to
> use more power (7200RPM, older electronic) than
> the newer drives and typical USB enclosure doesn't
> have any fan or anything to get rid of the heat
> from the drive.


Yep, thermals in external enclosures is a whole new topic. But, given that the drive won't have to work full throttle all the time, I guess it'll work for quite some time.

It's pretty old, but it's been a reliable drive. I might wind up using it solely for storage and just go with a flash drive for the OS.

Either way I'm going to have it wait, as it seems my DockStar is DOA :|

twinclouds Wrote:
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> True. However, what do you think about the
> limited write cycles of flash drives?

Has not been an issue for me so far. I ran a Linux box (mITX Atom 230 based) exclusively off an 8GB thumbdrive for 2 years and it never lost any capacity. I'm approaching one year with my Dockstar and its thumbdrive, haven't had any issues there, either. More often than not, one will see decreasing total capacity over time before a flash drive would outright fail. Between the two brands I've used the most... Sandisk and PNY, I haven't had any failed sticks in any system yet. They tend to die from physical damage before write exhaustion. ;)

Still good to have a backup image ready to go just in case, though.

Yesterday, after another tiny power outage, I once again went through my 'filesystem repair' procedures with my Debian USB stick on Pogoplug Pink, and this time -- sadly -- no matter what I did, read/write errors kept cropping up and ultimately preventing me (so I think) from being able to start my webserver running again. I went into 'emergency' mode and rebuilt everything from scratch on *another* USB stick. Is my original 8gb USB stick dead? Who knows... :(

Anyways, things are humming along nicely again, but I am searching for easy solutions to prevent these annoyances in the future. I considered changing from 'ext2' to 'ext3/ext4' basis the instructions in:

http://forum.doozan.com/read.php?2,5089,5246

...however, I don't know exactly what it means to "...change the usb_rootfstype uBoot parameter to ext3..."?

So, if I ever run into trouble again, I am thinking of switching from a USB stick to a USB drive instead (already connected with data, and no OS). From the thread above, it looks like this should work OK -- but I am again confused about to use 'ext3/ext4' so that the system is 'self-fixing' after power failures?

- If I wanted to save some time, could I copy some directories off the USB stick to the USB drive (which ones?).

- How does '/boot' magically end up in its own directory if I do so?

- Would it be better just to re-install everything *again*?

Thanks

What I did to recover was relatively painless. I always have a backup image of the USB stick (using USB Image Tool). All real data (shared folders and such) are on USB HDD. The USB stick is still corrupted by power failure, but can be restored right away using the USB Image Tool.