I too have been experimenting with an external enclosure for use as a backup device. I use several 160G drives and rotate them as backup devices for my server and desktops.
The results have been far less than perfect.
The first enclosure I bought didn't work with Linux at all. Heck, I had a lot of trouble getting it work with Windows so it went back. The second enclosure was by ADS and is a USB2.0/1394 enclosure.
Since my motherboard had only USB1.1 but I had a 1394 card I tried 1394 first. At first it was great, the disc performance was only slightly lower than native IDE but I ran into two problems. The drive had to unplugged at boot time otherwise the drive wouldn't work at all. If it was hot plugged in it "usually" worked fine. The second problem is that it would frequently cause the system to lock up hard on heavy disk load such as backing up the desktop it was plugged into. Backups over the network never seemed to cause that problem.
After a few days of trying various drivers, different kernels, etc. and not getting any results I gave up on 1394 and reverted to USB1.1. I found it was adequate for backups as they're done late at night. A full backup of my server only took 5 hours so I was content. No lockup problems either and no problems with the drive being connected at boot time either.
I thought that maybe USB was the answer so I ordered a USB2.0 card to get better performance. That card arrived yesterday and I immediately plugged it in and did a backup of the local PC and within 5 minutes the system locked up hard.
So I'm back to USB1.1 and a 1Mbyte/sec transfer rate but at least it works.
Glenn wrote:
Hello:
I had some thoughts about using an external USB hard drive for backing up my Linux installation. I can find no information indicating that such a drive is supported by RH 9. The RH compatibility list was no help at all.
Does anone have any knowledge about whether this is feasible?
Any feedback appreciated.
TIA
Regards,
Glenn n0hn@xxxxxxxxxx
-- Greg Gulik http://www.gulik.org/greg/ greg @ gulik.org
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