[tlug] USB3 hard disks

[Darren Cook <darren@example.com>]

I've bought a couple of 1TB USB3 hard disks recently, and have been
really pleased with them. They are so much quicker, for both read and
write, than the Buffalo network RAID-1 drive I have (*).
Just as important, for using rsync, is that I formatted them as ext4,
meaning they have proper timestamps and proper permissions and rysnc
just works. [2]

First one I bought was Lacie, 6,458 yen in Bic. For the second one I
chose the 2nd cheapest, which was Toshiba HD-AA10Tx for 8,931 yen. (Both
prices including tax.)

Toshiba have three drives to choose from; the middle-price one
apparently only adds "works on Mac" in bigger letters. The most
expensive one adds an encrypted disk, or something like that.

For each of my two disks, I plugged it into my notebook, running mint
16, went to disk management, said to format it as an encrypted drive,
gave a passphrase, and I'm up and copying over files within a few minutes.

Quick question: I've two USB3 sockets. If I plug two hard disks in, and
want to copy the entire contents of one drive to the other drive,
roughly how long will it take? Does anyone do something like this as
part of their backup strategy? (No longer having RAID-1 on either my
main notebook, or my backup device(s), is making me nervous.)

Darren


[1]: Which is further in my bad books as one of the hard disks appears
to have died. (It is 9 months old.) I've been busy trying to get all the
data off on to alternative hard disks, then will go in and try some of
the rebuilding options, to see if it is truly dead. There is also a
surprising lack of detailed information: all I'm getting is that one
drive has an "error".


[2]: The Buffalo drive uses FAT, I think, so I had to use
--modify-window = 1 when using rsync, otherwise it would think
everything was an update.

-- 
Darren Cook, Software Researcher/Developer
My new book: Data Push Apps with HTML5 SSE
Published by O'Reilly: (ask me for a discount code!)
  http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920030928.do
Also on Amazon and at all good booksellers!