On Mon, 05 Apr 2010 16:21:14 +0100, Dave Liquorice wrote:

On Mon, 5 Apr 2010 14:01:07 +0000 (UTC), Jules Richardson wrote:

I had/have a Seagate (250GB) one. Niggles included the fact that it
used a bulky wall-wart rather than integrated PSU (and "kettle lead"),

Can't see why this kit would need a kettle lead a small fig 8 one would
do

Yep, true - although I quite like one standard lead for computer kit
rather than each of them doing their own thing. I think any case (with
adequate ventilation around the drive) probably ends up being high enough
to take one of the sockets.

but I agree integrated PSU would be nice but that adds to the cost.
They can't just automatically make 10 million identical units and then
"regionalise" them by just adding the wall wart for the destination
region when they are manually packaged.

Yeah, I can understand why they did it - I just don't like wall-warts as
they often get in the way of adjacent stuff (and they have a habit of
falling out of the ****ty things that pass for plug sockets here in the
US :-)

Having a USB powered device would be nice, no wall wart but I think the
negatives out weigh that convience. The negatives being that the drive
will probably be "laptop" spec and I can't site the drive remotely from
the server that it is backing up.

Oh yes - agree with that totally; I wouldn't want one powered solely via
USB for that same reason.

the fact that it was tall and thin (so could be knocked over easily),

That particular Seagate sits flat.

Given it's 500GB rather than the 250 I have, I assume it's a more recent
model (I got mine in 2007) - sounds like they fixed that particular flaw.

and the fact that it'd automatically spin down after x minutes of
inactivity (increasing potential for failure - drives generally don't
like lots of stop-start cycles)

Depends what makes it spin back up again. I have NAS drive in a cheap
enclosure but it is slow. A full back up takes around 18hrs for 30 odd
Gig, the same drive in a networked PC only took a couple of hours. The
spin down delay time is configurable think I have it set to 5 mins and
AFAICT it doesn't spin up unless you really try to access the drive. ie
windows network chatter "I'm here, are you?" stuff doesn't spin it back
up.

This one is configurable in terms of delay, but the delay feature can't
be turned off completely - and given how start-up's the most "stressful"
time for a drive, I'd like to reduce the frequency of starts as much as
possible (energy-saving be damned).

In the early days of having it, it caused a few headaches too because the
drive would spin-down due to inactivity, and access would wake it back up
again (that being a function of the controller that the drive was plugged
into) - but the OS (Linux) assumed* it was an "always on" disk and so any
access would fail until the drive was back up to speed.

* I found a way of configuring it so that wasn't the case, but it still
had to be done every time the drive was plugged in. Thankfully modern
kernels seem to be 'fixed' and spot that it's a removable disk, so they
check and wait for spin-up automatically.

cheers

Jules