USB 3 / eSATA support

[Dean E. Weimer]

>
> I think for now I am going to build FreeBSD VM on my windows box and
> dedicate it to running Bacula Director and Storage Daemon, I was able
> to get a 20MB sustained through put through the VMware USB emulation
> copying a file from an SFTP as I had no large files on the local
> system from my test FreeBSD 9 VM.  Though now I don't know why I
> didn't think to just us dd from /dev/random to a file on the disk,
> will likely give that a try once my new VM is built.  This will get 
> me
> by performance to a workable speed until I can come up with a more
> permanent solution, and keep me from spending more money this month 
> so
> I have a little bit left to add to my savings account.

Just an update to this thread in case anyone runs into it, and thinks 
building a FreeBSD VM within VMware to run Bacula backups to a USB hard 
drive is a good idea.  It turns out that it isn't, not sure if its a 
VMware FreeBSD guest issue, or a general VMware USB issue, but the heavy 
load on the USB drive has caused several crashes of the host system.  
Which of course in turn means a hard crash of the FreeBSD virtual 
machine, complete with corrupted file systems.  It did give me some 
practice recovering lost Bacula database as I lost my whole PostgreSQL 
database due to corrupted files once.  This might work for many small 
files, backups ran OK for my web server, but backups against the FreeNAS 
server with around 200G about 100G is an iTunes library, and around 
another 20G is photos.  When hitting these bigger files with less 
overhead that allowed for more throughput to the USB device the crashes 
began to occur.

Of course, I should note this setup was done with a FreeBSD9.0-Release 
virtual machine built from source, using clang, and all ports where 
possible also built with clang.  And running open-vm-tools (these do 
fail to build with clang) as the VMware tools won't install on FreeBSD 
9.0  I am sure VMware has not done any testing with this setup yet, nor 
do I know if they ever will.  So the problem may not exist with other 
guest operating systems.

Also of note, I was originally running under a windows 7 host PC, after 
the crashes, I switched to CentOS 6 on the host, with a windows Virtual 
machine to run the applications needing windows.  The crashes still 
occur under CentOS, though a little less frequent than they did under 
windows.

-- 
Thanks,
  Dean E. Weimer
  http://www.dweimer.net/