[mythtv-users] USB Harddrives

Thomas Pedersen tp at gvdnet.dk
Mon Jul 21 16:36:36 UTC 2008


Peter VanDerWal skrev:
>> 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")
>
> _______________________________________________
> mythtv-users mailing list
> mythtv-users at mythtv.org
> http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
>
>   
Just thought of eSATA ;) ... well seem like I can be happy I didn't 
bought any new external device yet,
with all the Linux Power Management issues those WD disks seems to have.

Anyone knows how long time it takes before the drive turns off, and is 
the only solution actually to remount those drives?

Just an idea about the sata-drive thing, it is actually possible to buy 
a PCI SATA controller card out there, should do the
trick. Of course you still have to find a slot for physically installing 
the drive...


More information about the mythtv-users mailing list