[mythtv-users] USB Harddrives

[Peter VanDerWal]

> On 7/21/08, Mitch Gore <mitchell.gore at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> as a temporary working (well permanent until something better comes
>> along) i
>> made a hourly cron job that mounts and umounts the drive.  hopefully
>> this
>> will keep the drive active enough to not goto sleep.
>>
>
> With my 1 TB MyBook I had read that the drive would spin itself down
> after about 10 minutes of inactivity, so I set up a cron job to
> 'touch' a dummy file every 5 minutes.

I do hope you are backing up that data.

USB drives are really not intended to be used this way, and keeping a
drive running continuously tends to lead to short lifespans.

I'd think if you want to use external drives that you'd be better off
using SATA.  Any particular reason you folks aren't doing this?  I mean
besides the fact that USB is a little bit cheaper (I'm pretty sure there
is some correlation between "cheap" and "longevity")