Feedback for a small server project

[Daniel Feenberg]

On Thu, 12 Nov 2020, Kevin P. Neal wrote:

>
> I tried using a hard drive connected through a USB hub once. I got burned.
> I haven't tried it since. OK, this was on MacOS X, but still...

For the last 2 months I have been doing offline backups to 2.5" USB drives 
from Toshiba, Seagate and Western Digital in 1GB to 5GB capacities. I just 
took whatever Microcenter had cheapest. There have been no problems with 
any of the 7 drives. These are mostly (all?) SMR drives, and you can feel 
the head moving for a while after the computer stops sending data. 
Presumably that is data being copied from the non-SMR cache to its final 
resting place. I haven't investigated what would happen if the power went 
off during that process. It is annoying that the vendors aren't more 
explicit but I have been quite pleased by the reliability so far.

Daniel Feenberg