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General Hardware General hardware related questions. |
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looking for external drive buy suggestions
I finally decided my self to spend some money on an external drive. I will use this for backups but I would like to keep it always on and use it simply as extra space to use any time.
Looking at the prices around, 1T seems to be the best deal, I'll be able to store all my stuff and have plenty of space for the future (at the moment I have less than 200g of files hanging around in three drives, one of which with a lot of bad sectors). Specs always say that the drive's software will work with Windows n. I guess it will be recognized fine by OpenBSD, but will I miss anything interesting without that software? Are there any external drives designed for unix? Is it fine to leave the drive always on? Will it be noisy? What about power consumption? Also, I guess to have a 1T partition is not a good idea. I will not format the whole drive, just start to use the size I need. Any suggestions on partition size? What about sector size (I have one huge file of little less than 100G, yes hudred gigs, should I take any particular care in making a partition for it with special sector size?)? Lots of question marks... Last edited by gosha; 3rd June 2009 at 07:43 AM. |
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I currenlt have 250GB 2.5 Western Digital disk in case, works with USB 2.0 but requires two cables to connect to provide more power (USB 2.0 only sends about 500mV), works very good under all BSDs, OpenSolaris, Windows, ...
My buddy recently got Seagate 5400.5, which needed only one cord for work, propably it uses little less power, so that may be better sollution. You should also consider geting case with eSATA if you have eSATA on your motherboard (such cases also have USB 2.0 as a fallback) so you will get great speed where you can while still be able to connect to everything.
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religions, worst damnation of mankind "If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened." Linus Torvalds Linux is not UNIX! Face it! It is not an insult. It is fact: GNU is a recursive acronym for “GNU's Not UNIX”. vermaden's: links resources deviantart spreadbsd |
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thanks for the quick reply.
Actually, I will connect it to my macmini, which has a firewire port, but OpenBSD macppc does not support firewire. Would a drive with an ethernet or wireless connection be an option? What about security risks (would have to connect it to my router)? |
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I do not have any experience with firewire, so I cannot hel you here, but I do not recall cases with firewire port, at least not these that are stand alone parts/cases where you need to buy the disk yourself (which is cheaper).
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religions, worst damnation of mankind "If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened." Linus Torvalds Linux is not UNIX! Face it! It is not an insult. It is fact: GNU is a recursive acronym for “GNU's Not UNIX”. vermaden's: links resources deviantart spreadbsd |
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well, I'm having a look online, and the price of a ready-to-use one and a drive+case are about the same, here in Beijing I can get on line a maxtor or seagate or western digital for less than 800 rmb, which seems reasonable, and with a warranty covering the whole product and not two for two products...
ps macmini also has usb 2.0 of course Last edited by gosha; 3rd June 2009 at 08:53 AM. |
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I would get a USB drive, most of them are USB Mass Storage Devices.. standardized.. so OpenBSD should recognize them, perhaps it won't be able to utilize any of the software controlled buttons on the name branded models, but that isn't important.
It is possible to find a quirky device that doesn't work, but most stores are refund policies.. so.. you should be able to find a replacement in that case. FFS predates widely available portable mass storage devices, so all on-disk structures are in the hosts native byte order.. Little Endian vs Big Endian. That means you won't be able to mount your partition on a i386 system, or any other system with hw.byteorder as 1234, only systems where hw.byteorder is 4321. If you don't plan on mounting this drive on any other system, there isn't much of a problem.. except if this system suddenly fails, you'll probably have to find another Big Endian architecture to retrieve your files. Possible solutions are to use EXT2 on the drive instead, OpenBSD supports mounting this file system in the GENERIC kernel.. but you'll need sysutils/e2fsprogs to create your partitions. A network storage device might be another option, some exist that provide NFS/SMB/CIFS.. or just FTP. I hope that helps, good luck gosha. |
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I really have to think carfully this one... |
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Although Firewire is a faster protocol when compared to USB, only Apple has embraced it. The number of hardware products featuring Firewire are dwindling.
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http://www.knowledgerush.com/kr/encyclopedia/OSI_model/ Quote:
Although you might not find the following a viable alternative, Amazon makes its infrastructure available for storage purposes. Given how cheap their service is, you may want to consider it as an option for disaster recovery: http://aws.amazon.com/ OpenBSD's misc@ mailing list had a thread on off-site storage several months back, where Amazon's services were discussed in passing: http://marc.info/?t=123430035200005&r=1&w=2 |
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I'm concerned about some, so I might encrypt a part of it. But the thing is that my router is exposed to the internet, while the macmini is inside, using pf (it is the basic model, with no wireless, so I could only do that to be able to connect to my winbox. I don't have such a fast connection, so Amazon isn't really an option. I never thought choosing an external drive would have so many issues, the big/small endian one being the most problematic. Computer world seems to really love to enforce incompatibility... |
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Or you could get yourself a generic USB2 drive case and a cheap HD. To format it use ext2 (don't use fat because it can't handle files bigger than 4GB, which you say you have plenty of).
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thanks, same suggestion as BSDfan666, so using EXT2 would not have big/small endian issues even if I do it from my mac mini ppc?
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Nope, it should be safe to use EXT2 in such a situation..
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As I said, FFS predates widely available portable mass storage devices.. at that time, developers were interested in performance, converting between different byte orders would have been quite costly.
FFS on big endian is optimized for big endian. FFS on little endian is optimized for little endian. The EXT family of filesystems were designed for Linux on the i386.. and while eventually they ported it to other systems, it probably made sense for them to keep the filesystem compatible with i386. |
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Looking for External Hard Disk
Even I am looking for external hard drive. I am more concerned about the data transfer rate of the drive. Could anyone suggest an external SSD hard drive if available? What is eSATA hard drive?
Regards |
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Most SSDs are 2.5" size with SATA interface, which makes them possible to use in external 2.5 USB 2.0 case or using eSATA, but IMHO they are so expensive, that they are good only for SYSTEM, for casual storage use HDDs, same for external case imho, HDD will do here.
You can also get 7200 RPM 2.5 HDD to make things fly faster.
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religions, worst damnation of mankind "If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened." Linus Torvalds Linux is not UNIX! Face it! It is not an insult. It is fact: GNU is a recursive acronym for “GNU's Not UNIX”. vermaden's: links resources deviantart spreadbsd |
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Thanks vermaden for your reply. Can you guess how long it will take for Solid State Drives to get cheaper and common in computers?
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Surprisingly, Intel is marketing solid-state drives today for very expensive prices. Stories abound that Seagate has a competitive solution, but will not introduce it to the market until the economy recovers. The answer to your question may in in the order of years -- at least two... |
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I've read a discussion where the latest revision in the SSD manufacturing
process greatly decreases the years before write and/or read failure. I fail to recollect whether that is just one manufacturer, whether the thread refuted the idea, or any other details...
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FreeBSD 13-STABLE |
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I think you will need at least two years to make these prices down, but even then HDDs will be cheaper.
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religions, worst damnation of mankind "If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened." Linus Torvalds Linux is not UNIX! Face it! It is not an insult. It is fact: GNU is a recursive acronym for “GNU's Not UNIX”. vermaden's: links resources deviantart spreadbsd |
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