4 ms·
Performance is important but my main problem is reliability of the usb to SATA controllers. In practice you often get weird timeout issues and unintelligible e
by smashed 4y ago
Performance is important but my main problem is reliability of the usb to SATA controllers.
In practice you often get weird timeout issues and unintelligible errors in kernel logs, hard resets, drives disconnecting or worst, data corruption. It's also always difficult to tell if it is a failing drive, or if it's a controller bug, or power supply issue.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y agoDoes SMART work over usb? If not how are you alerted of drive problem?
- doubled112 4y agoThis is another thing that really depends on the USB to SATA controller you use. Some are OK, some are great, and some are garbage before they make it to a warehouse shelf.
- johnklos 4y agoIt depends on the USB-SATA adapter. Yes, I get some SMART data using smartctl. I also get alerted if a pending write takes longer than a few ticks, which would indicate issues.
- johnklos 4y agoThe primary issue with USB-SATA is power. Give a good USB-SATA adapter, the drive, and the host computer good power, and you'll see excellent reliability. My 1U Raspberry Pi server with two mirrored spinning rust disks on USB-SATA has been up continuously since September and has been busy with running SearXNG, DNS, email, web (including dynamic sites), MySQL, and so on, while also being used to compile while heavily going in to swap. In other words, it has been doing non-stop disk I/O since September without an issue. This is because everything in the machine has excellent power :)
- ilyt 4y agoYou get that with cheap PCIe SATA ones too, gotta watch out. I eventually traced my NAS problems to that, shitty controller (I had 4 ports off mobo + 2 extra off controller)