[Gllug] External hard disks

[Jack Bertram]

I've been accumulating hard disks inside my main server at home for a
while now (you know how it is - one gets full, so you buy another; then
one dies so you replace it with two, etc.) which leaves me with I think
7 of them inside now.

Smartd has just let me know that one of them is giving errors, so I've
moved all the data off it (isn't LVM2 great!) and deactivated the disk.
When I get around to it I'll remove it from the server too, although
quite how I'm going to know which physical disk corresponds to hde I
don't know.  But it brings me to a philosophical question.  I'm going to
keep running into this problem while I have so many small hard disks in
there.  I can't be bothered with RAID any more (I back up extensively,
and with LVM and snapshots there seems no need for mirroring) so why
shouldn't I just replace my main data disks with a large external USB2
drive in an enclosure?  (I'd keep the operating system on an internal
drive).

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.)
- smartd
- LVM

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

Thanks,
jack
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