[mythtv-users] USB Harddrives

[David Brodbeck]

On Mon, 21 Jul 2008 12:39:12 -0400, Graham Mitchell wrote
> On Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 4:31 AM, Peter VanDerWal 
> > 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")
> >
> 
> What makes you think the hard drives inside external enclosures are
> any more prone to failure than an internal drive? If you crack open
> the case you'll see they are the exact same drives they sell for
> internal use. Most that I've seen are just be IDE drives with a
> conversion to USB.

Yeah, and I've got one external drive that supports both USB and eSATA.

The interface doesn't affect reliability much, except in the case of software
bugs.  (For example, suspend/resume and mounted filesystems on USB are a bad
combination in Linux.)