e8vww wrote:tangent wrote:I once used ZFS on a drive in a dodgy USB enclosure, and got megs and megs of errors as a result.
I have never heard of this, was it the power source or the interface that was causing errors do you think?
Does it really matter? Let's think through the cases:
1. The enclosure electronics were the problem and the external power brick was fine. Solution: you toss the cheap electronics and get a better enclosure, which comes with its own power brick, so you might as well toss the old brick as well unless you've got some other use for it.
2. The brick is the problem, so you spend about as much on an aftermarket power brick as you spent on the enclosure, because you're trying to avoid underspending and getting the same problem. You might as well have replaced both pieces at once.
My purpose in using ZFS is not to let me get away with cheaping out on electronics. Unfortunately, that's hard to avoid in the USB world because China has convinced everyone that you can get a five-star enclosure for under $20. The problem is, those rating 5 stars would either not know an enclosure worth five stars if they saw one, or they'd see the price tag and rate it 1 star for "bad value."
I've never had a USB hub that's been problem-free, for example. Ports die, you have to occasionally unplug and re-plug everything, etc. We didn't tolerate that in the SCSI days, but then, we were spending $100 on cables, so we didn't have to put up with it. Now when you get an enclosure, cable, and power supply for $13.64 — not to mention the 20 years of inflation — if it fails we just shrug and say, "Well, what did you expect?"
The Thunderbolt market seems to be protected from this race to the bottom syndrome for now. Here's hoping that it remains a "high end" feature, from the PC world's perspective. It's what we used to call "normal."