[Gllug] External hard disks

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Sat, Jan 28, 2006 at 06:02:32PM +0000, Jack Bertram wrote:
> If I did this, presumably I could still use smartd to monitor it (over
> usb?) and include it in volume groups (using LVM2) but swapping it
> in/out when it failed would be much easier, and more hotpluggable.  I'd
> also be able to lock it away - altogether much more flexible.
> 
> Anyone got any experience with using one of these or can tell me
> whether they foresee any problems, with:
> - speed compared to SATA (doesn't have to be rocket speed, just hold
>   films, music, etc.)

Yeah, with USB-2 speed is not an issue.

> - smartd
> - LVM

I've got a 200 GB external drive I use LVM and snapshots with for testing
Fedora / RHEL installs on, never had any trouble. I always get slightly
nervous hot-unplugging the drive, but have never had any data loss or
corruption issues thus far. I just umount the filesystems, and then do
a 'vgchange -an' on the volume group to ensure its inactive as far as 
LVM is concerned & then pull the cable. Seems fine.

> (And I presume that you partition them and use them in exactly the same
> way as a normal internal drive?)

Yeah, the USB mass storage driver just presents them as SCSI disks, whihc
you can partition up as usual - hell get two USB drives and you could
run RAID across them with md driver :-)

Dan.
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