Re: Alternative to using USB-Stick as mass storage on NSLU2

[Rick Thomas <rbthomas@pobox.com>]

On Feb 18, 2010, at 12:55 PM, Björn Wetterbom wrote:

> I've used a Freecom 2.5" drive for a couple of years with good
> results. USB powered of course.
>
> I've also used an external WD 3.5" drive which I am very pleased with,
> and since WD offers a wide variety of 2.5" drives at good prices I
> would go for one of those.
>
> /Björn
>
>
>
> On Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 18:02,  <u7l11ey@mail.lrz-muenchen.de> wrote:
> > John Holland wrote
> >
> > > You could use a 2.5" HDD. The Momentus has a typical usage  
> > > specified @
> > > 1.5W seek and .7W idle.
> >
> > Thanks for pointing out the low energy consumption of modern 2.5"  
> > HDs.
> > Since others mentioned that SD is even less suitable for my  
> > purpose, I
> > think I'll go that route.
> >
> > Can anybody recommend a specific model of an external 2.5" drive that
> > works well with a slug under Debian (Lenny armel), preferably USB- 
> > powered
> > so I don't need an extra power supply?
> >
> > I've read a lot on nslu2-linux.org about spindown issues with HDs
> > connected to a slug. Since my slug is logging data continuously  
> > 24/7, I
> > guess I shouldn't let the HD spin down at all. Is that assumption  
> > correct?
> >
> > Regards, Richard

Sounds like a fun project!  Please keep us informed on what you wind  
up doing.

If whatever you use works OK with only USB power, that's great.  But  
I'd make sure that any external hard-drive at least has the *option*  
of external power, incase it turns out that the Slug can't provide  
enough to, e.g. spin-up at boot time.

Of course, external power will probably mean more total power drain  
(due to losses in the transformer, etc...)  There are trade-offs in  
all things.

Another low-power option would be to use a larger USB-stick (e.g. 8GB)  
which will allow the writes to be spread over more memory cells,  
increasing the total life of the stick.

And yet a third idea: You can rent a few gigabytes of storage "in the  
cloud" from places like Amazon.com.  Then you could use the cloud- 
storage as an energy efficient backup for your log files.

Whatever you do, frequent backups are always a good idea.

Enjoy!

Rick