[SLL] External Drives

[Joshua Daniel Franklin]

On Jan 2, 2008 7:33 AM, Eric Kahklen †wrote:
> We are looking to buy an external drive to back up data off our Linux
> server.  At home I have a Western Digital and Acomdata that seem to work
> well.  I've heard terrible things about the Maxtor One Touch.  What
> models have people had good luck with?

We have a Infrant ReadyNAS, a Linux-based "home NAS" which supports
external USB drives. They have a list of ones they've tested here:
http://www.infrant.com/wiki/index.php/Hardware_Compatibility_List
I also trust their hard drive list when looking for drives that work and
support SMART reporting on Linux. (By the way, I don't necessarily
recommend the ReadyNAS as it's performance is mediocre, but it has
very low power usage.)

I recommend going with USB instead of Firewire. We have some external
disks and the USB seems more stable. It may be the Firewire hardware
we're using, but I've tried several cards or integrated chips on laptops
with RHEL 4 and 5, Fedora 7 and 8, and Debian. The only thing that makes
it reliable is slowing down the transfer rate which defeats the purpose. I
should say that it only shows up when transferring hundreds of GiB at
once (data snapshot). I think at that point you're expected to use a SAN. :)