[Gllug] External hard disks

[Mike Brodbelt]

On Sat, 2006-01-28 at 18:02 +0000, Jack Bertram wrote:

> 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.)

Should be fine for this.

> - smartd

Sorry - you're SOL here. I played with this a while ago, and after
locking my entire machine up trying to run selftests, mailed the
developer. This is what I got:-

====================================================
(S)ATA disks bridged via USB or firewire represent a
problem for smartmontools. The bridge function simulates
a lame subset of SCSI commands (basically INQUIRY, READ
and WRITE) which do not include specialized commands used
by smartmontools on SCSI devices (e.g. LOG SENSE).

Furthermore the bridge function does not normally provide
a SCSI-ATA passthrough command, at least not in a standard
way, since until now they has been no "standard" way.
====================================================

Unless something's changed (and I'm not aware of it if it has), you will
be unable to do any monitoring of external devices. It's rather
annoying. Of course some motherboards these days have an external SATA
port, and there is a standard for externally attached SATA. If you could
use that, I would imagine monitoring would be fine, there being no
bridging involved.

> - LVM

No problem there, AFAIK.

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

Yup. Using udev to make them always appear with the same device ID,
whatever order you plug them in in is wise.

Mike

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