[PLUG] How to restore external drive

[John Jason Jordan]

On Mon, 15 Oct 2018 01:27:31 -0700
Tomas K <tomas.kuchta.lists at gmail.com> dijo:

>It seems that it would be safer to have the DAS array attached
>permanently to your NAS and access it over the network. That is if your
>NAS has eSATA port.
>
>That way it would be permanently attached like internal drives and that
>should avoid these type of synchronization errors - Especially when you
>use it as RAID0.
>
>RAID arrays, especially in striping configuration, do not like to be
>detached or put to sleep without proper sync and umount.

The Synology NAS does not have an eSATA port, but it does have a USB
port, so I could probably attach the Mediasonic to it. And I agree that
doing so might make the connection more stable - the NAS is across the
room, while the Mediasonic is on my desk where stuff gets moved around
a bit. However, I have long been impatient with the speed of the
Mediasonic; moving or renaming a file can take over a minute while the
drives whir and the lights dance. I lust for SSDs to replace the two WD
Red Pro drives in it, but the cost of 16TB of SSDs always makes me
discard the notion. If I attach the Mediasonic to the Synology I wonder
about access time compared to its current USB 3 connection. 

During the restore from backup the GUI (Nautilus) gave me a popup with
continuous information on the progress, and it reported a steady 115-116
Mbps transfer rate, so that is apparently the max that my home ethernet
can do.

I have been shopping for a new computer and I'm currently looking at a
Thinkpad P72 (not yet available in the US) or a P71 that I can buy
right now. Both come with Intel Thunderbolt 3 USB-C ports that are
capable of 40Gbps, compared to the 5Gbps of my USB 3.0 connection or
3GBps of eSATA. Then again, the WD Red Pro drives are SATA-3, which are
rated at 6Gbps, so until I go to SSDs there wouldn't be much to gain.
And the only faster enclosures available are Mediasonic rated at
10Gbps. What would be really cool is 16TB of SSDs mounted inside the
laptop itself. 

>If attaching it permanently to NAS is not an option, autofs with
>reasonable timeout avoiding the DAS power saving mode, instead of mount
>in fstab, would probably help too.

The Synology is mounted by a line in fstab, but not the Mediasonic. I
have thought of doing so, but haven't bothered; it's trivial to mount
it with the GUI. But if doing so can increase access speed I'm all for
it.