-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Friday, 2008-10-17 at 09:56 -0400, Greg Freemyer wrote:
Fergus,
We use a lot of external drives and I agree with your caution.
The biggest issue with standalone enclosures is many of them do not have cooling fans, etc.
Our experience is that drives 500GB or larger need cooling fans. Without them they fail.
Another thing to consider is the power need by the disk itself, that can be more than what the box can supply. You have to look carefully at the specifications for both disk and box. One I bought recently burnt out in two days. Another is that the chipset usually does not allow for running SMART tests, so it is difficult to estimate the disk health; and the biggest the disk the more danger of loosing more data - obviously :-) An interesting thing is that some of those enclosures have both an USB port and a SATA port (the internal disk has to be SATA too). If you have an eSATA socket on the machine, you can save data to the disk much faster, and probably run SMART tests on it - and still connect it to computers with only USB ports, too. - -- Cheers, Carlos E. R. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.9 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAkj5RxoACgkQtTMYHG2NR9XG7QCgjx5Fzv/JkRiTMj3tjRdt5F+b gM0AnAzKmqb95MgIkB3HoeEZmoV4aNDW =Gr7e -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org