Reliable storage
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GavinWraith (26) 1538 posts |
The FAT32FS-formatted memory stick that I use to transfer files between my RISC OS and Raspbian machines has just died – Discknight could only pronounce no rescue possible. This has frightened me into deciding to buy a more reliable storage medium. |
Steve Pampling (1551) 7956 posts |
Network storage, cheap reliable and USB connect seems like an impossible target. That said most NAS setups also allow USB connection. The thing is I work in IT, as you probably know, and having my data storage in the same building never mind the same room is slightly strange and copies in different locations is normal. So is a wired network round the house… |
GavinWraith (26) 1538 posts |
I live in a village at the end of the line. Until a couple of years ago broadband speeds were very slow. Even now the router occasionally indicates that the signal has gone down, perhaps because badgers are partying in the cabinet. So I have little faith in clouds. I prefer to hug my data close and offer up an excuse to Zeus Nephelegeretes. |
Steve Pampling (1551) 7956 posts |
I’m barely beyond the city boundary (a whole 3/4 mile) but the exchange is the other direction in the next but one village, so I had the same, until FTTC was rolled out locally. I was referring to a NAS box. For relatively little you can plug a Terabyte of storage into your home network1, many boxes will do a raid setup to minimize the effect of the inevitable disc failure and a second storage could be another box or as you mention cloud1 storage. 1I find that a UPS and storage sit very nicely together with the router. 2 I tend to steer clear of the idea of cloud, but that’s probably because of restrictions on the data at work combined with the issues of dealing with arranging traffic through a specific link when the damn data store moves around. BNF for example have a cloud server but require a specific source IP for their users and pushing the query traffic through a random one of the 384 peering IP’s of N3 means anyone using the same IP at another time can see certain “private” directories. |
Rick Murray (539) 13424 posts |
? DiscKnight deals with FAT as well? I’d have tried Looks like, in the command line, you will want to do: diskutil list to get the identifier of the FAT device (/dev/disk followed by a number), then: /sbin/fsck_msdos /dev/disk# (where ‘#’ is the number you read from diskutil) Of course, if diskutil can’t identify the device, you’re a bit stuck…
There’s no such thing, especially “cheap and reliable”. Spinning rust is generally more reliable than flash (as long as you don’t subject it to shocks) however real drives consume a fair bit of power and wear out too, in time. Especially if power cycled a lot (as USB drives are prone to be). Here’s what I do: 1. Buy a harddisc. Something nice and large, formatted NTFS (or whatever your Mac prefers) so it won’t wet itself when you present it with a file over 4GB in size. This rules out FAT, by the way. If the media should fail, just drop the most recent backdrop onto the second media that you bought, and carry on. Remember to purchase another device to keep it for spare. ;-) That’s sort of how I manage the boot SD card on the Pi. It’s 8GB so large enough to be useful, but not so large that imaging it takes an eternity.
This is how you can spot those who buy into the cloud hype, and those who have a brain.
And you’re going to have to say goodbye to your fax machines, as apparently the higher ups have decided it’s easier to push patient details around by email than fax. Am I the only problem who has a klaxon sounding in my head?
How end of line? Mine’s 4.7km. When I got broadband, 1 megabit was the most I could expect. An update to the Livebox brought this to 2 megabits, maybe, on a good day.
I get that too. I like to think that the exchange deals with it getting itself in a twist by automatically rebooting. We’re a far cry from the days of the Strowger switch. I bet the only moving part in a modern exchange is the ventilation fan… I don’t NAS. Just some 500GB1 harddiscs. Stuff I’m wanting to watch at this point in time (DVD rips, so I can watch them on the phone in bed rather than the monitor with the 200W computer attached!) are copied onto a µSD card so I can plug the tiny reader into the phone’s OTG port. I don’t transfer large amounts of data frequently enough to make it worthwhile running a NAS (or even making one out of a spare Pi)… 1 Decimal gigabytes because we’re talking harddiscs… about 40-60GiB less after conversion to real gigabytes, formatting, journalling log use, etc etc. |
Chris Mahoney (1684) 2112 posts |
I wonder how long my physical cable is. I’m in “fibre country” so as far as I know, the distance doesn’t really matter. It certainly handles my 100 Mb/s plan without any issues. I don’t miss copper… |
John Sandgrounder (1650) 574 posts |
Depends what you mean by cheap. I use Crucial Solid State Drives with a USB interfacee. They can be formatted to FAT32 and will work with RiscOS, Rasbian, Windo$e, etc. They also work very nicely formatted to SCSIFS. I have my systems set to boot from SCSIFS Drive 4. The SDcard only has the six files needed by the Pi Hardware startup. Much more reliable and easier to backup. |
Steve Pampling (1551) 7956 posts |
One of the buildings housing one data centre is the old RT building and the computer room walls and ceiling are four foot thick concrete, with lead and paper. |
Steve Pampling (1551) 7956 posts |
About bl***y time. I went to a demo of a fax server system (supposed to be first stage of killing the things off) a few years ago. Didn’t happen because some twonk in whitehall shuffled the money. That was oh so recently – like 1995 IIRC (could have been 1994)
Email has been discouraged, unless encrypted, for a number of years (might be double digits) |
Alan Adams (2486) 1129 posts |
Flash memory has a limited number of writes allowed for each location. To handle this, the controller in each device periodically remaps the frequently used areas to avoid exceeding the limits. The issue that distinguishes between devices is how this is done. Most early devices were vulnerable to power being removed during this process, partly because the most used area is usually the root directory. This is why the advice is always to eject devices before removing them. The effect of this problem is to render the device unusable – no attempts to reformat or repair work, because the problem is not with the disc structure presented to the user, but is with the mapping within the controller to the physical addresses. Newer devices use better algorithms to make the problems less likely. SSDs seem to have better algorithms than flash USB devices. However I do not believe any device is completely immune to the risk. For the original question – if you want the most reliable device to plug into USB, I would suggest an SSD with a USB-SATA adapter, i.e. an external disc rather than a stick. You’d need to check the power requirements however, as it may need to hang off a powered hub. |
Matthew Phillips (473) 687 posts |
Can you power one of these drives via USB from a Raspberry Pi, Pandboard, Beagleboard or whatever? I have some older USB spinning discs from Freecom, but they draw too much power so take up two USB sockets on a Beagleboard, leaving only two spare. And sometimes they don’t behave and need external power. |
Chris Hall (132) 3511 posts |
Yes. I have a Crucial SSD and their USB interface running happily on a Pi. |
John Sandgrounder (1650) 574 posts |
Yes. All 6 of my RasPi systems permanently have either SSD or mSATA connected via a single USB port. The Pi I am using now has both a filecore formatted mSATA and a FAT32 Crucial SSD. The total, steady state, current draw of the Pi and the two ‘discs’ is 630mA. I use RasPi offical power bricks. I do not have any of the other boards you mention, but see no reason why it would not be the same. I have just copied the whole of the mSATA drive (4.5Gbyte including RiscOSM) to the FAT32 and the total current draw (Pi and two USB drives) never went above 920mA. All 24478 files copied OK. |
GavinWraith (26) 1538 posts |
In the end I lashed out all of £24 on a Sonnics 320Gb USB hard drive. I use it with a powered USB hub, but it seems to function just as well when plugged straight into a Raspberry Pi. I was a bit taken aback at the Disc out of memory message when I tried to transfer the contents of a smallish memory stick to it, and then saw that the RISC OS Rpi only saw a FAT32 hard-disk of a few Gb capacity. So I plugged it into the Raspbian Rpi, which saw it as 320Gb, and downloaded GParted. With that I partitioned it into 5 64Gb ext4 partitions. Then I had a change of heart, realizing that I would probably be using it more with RISC OS, and reformatted it with FAT32FS. Now RISC OS is seeing all 320GB. It functions silently and fits easily into a breast pocket. It is rather slimmer than the pacemaker my mother had fitted into her left shoulder, twenty years ago. I suppose pacemakers are pill-sized nowadays. That suggests that in a few years a whole desktop system, apart from the monitors, will fit into my left nostril. Monty Python was on the ball. |
Matthew Phillips (473) 687 posts |
Would that be one of these: https://uk.crucial.com/gbr/en/ctsatausbcable |
Chris Hall (132) 3511 posts |
Except that mine’s white, Yes. |
John Sandgrounder (1650) 574 posts |
Hi Matthew, I have one of those (in black). It works fine electrically, but I found the angled connector to be a pain. It now sits in a cupboard and I use these: (all connectors on the same end of a neat bundle of Pi and SSD. Or, they can sit along side each other, glued to the back of a monitor) https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01N2JIQR7 Cheaper, as well. |
Clive Semmens (2335) 3136 posts |
Thank you Gavin – I now also have a Sonnics 320Gb USB hard drive, thanks to your post. Magic. I also had to reformat it to see more than 2 Gb. I don’t have a pacemaker, but I do have a heart monitor implanted in my chest – apparently in the same case as a pacemaker would be. It’s 50mm x 12mm x 4mm, by the feel of it, with very rounded corners (obviously!) |
GavinWraith (26) 1538 posts |
The only things that take up a lot of room on my desk now are monitors. I suppose those could be replaced by a teeny projector. Or have roll-up LED screens appeared on the market yet? All this stuff will be miniaturized yet further and grown into the human body soon enough. My dishwasher has functioned flawlessly for a decade, but has begun to flash its lights at me. A service engineer came today and inserted an attachment from his computer into a tiny hole on the front that I had not noticed before, and the two devices communicated by infra-red light. The dishwasher declared itself a write-off. The NHS will soon be doing something similar with telemetry. Best of luck with the heart. |
Clive Semmens (2335) 3136 posts |
Monitors…I only have one nowadays: http://clive.semmens.org.uk/RISCOS/index.php?Desk2017 I don’t think they do teeny 4K projectors yet, do they? Keyboards (often two – one for the Mac and one for the Pi) and trackpad and mouse (ditto) are the only computer related things on the desk. Heart monitor talks RF to a small unit on the bedside table, which phones the cardiology department via the mobile phone network. So far the symptoms are less scary than the idea of having wires put into the heart for a pacemaker, and aren’t life-threatening (apparently!) but they’re keeping an eye on me. |
Rick Murray (539) 13424 posts |
Why I roll up screen? What you need is visual wallpaper (that is, itself, a screen). It will have a matrix of LEDs embedded into it, edge connectivity so they can determine their position (which strip they are), and embedded into the wall will be tiny power transmitters, not unlike those used for wireless phone charging. Of course this will be the point where it all breaks down. You see it might be possible and nice to see the movie your phone is playing on the entire end wall of your bedroom, only to find out that your wallpaper is incompatible with your phone… And as for plugging in a Pi, well it would be possible if the Pi HDMI spoke SmartView version 1.7g revision 2 or later…
They do stuff like that with cars nowadays too.
By what measure of analysis? There was once a day when a bloke would come and replace motors and belts and things as necessary… I mean, let’s face it, a dishwasher is pretty much like a washing machine right? Instead of spin cycle (bad for crockery) there will be a pump to shift the water around (better for crockery). Inlet valve (or two of it can take a feed from the hot tap), bilge pump, door lock, heater element, maybe a pH sensor if it’s a smarter model…? I don’t think I’ve missed anything unless there’s a little peristaltic pump for the cleaning liquid? The spinning arms ought to be mechanical, working off water pressure. So, why does the machine think it can write itself off? If a bit is wearing out, replace it, and understand that if the cost of fixing is too much, it’s the human that makes such decisions. Jeez, next thing you know it’ll park itself on the dining room table while wearing a yellow vest…
I bet that’s a hacker’s paradise. Does the heart monitor only monitor? Do you know how the comms works? 433MHz? Bluetooth? |
GavinWraith (26) 1538 posts |
Cash. The engineer’s computer read out the faults, looked up the costs of repair and compared the total with the cost of a new machine. I have no means of arguing the matter, alas. And I would not want to offend Dimitrios, the engineer. I don’t think DIY dishwashers, or their Raspberry Pi equivalents, have appeared yet. Big gap in the market, maybe? I will suggest it to Miele, though I think I know what the response would be! The dishwasher has to monitor the hardness of the local water (very bad) as well as the gunge it has to cope with. |
Frederick Bambrough (1372) 825 posts |
We used to have DIY dishwashers but now we use a machine. |
Clive Semmens (2335) 3136 posts |
Our 16-year-old Volvo has it, as does our 14-year-old Honda. Aldi sold us the gizmo for interrogating any vehicle with the system for £14.99, with a booklet containing the generic codes, and you can get the vehicle-specific codes online for most vehicles. Handy. I was able to the other day to detect that the reason the engine warning light had come on was that there’d been an error in the engine management unit, but that it was now okay. Pretty certainly because the battery had been flat and failing to start the engine had pulled the 12V down too much for the poor thing. Too many short runs in the dark. Battery charged and all is well, and engine warning light cancelled (you need the gizmo to cancel it!)
(1) Probably. (2) Fortunately, yes. The doc can program it to select which sort of events to record, and I have another little gizmo that I keep in my pocket, to tell it when I think it ought to keep the last few minutes instead of overwriting them, but it’s not a pacemaker or a defibrillator. (3) I don’t know, no. Very low power, obviously – it’s been going for three years so far on its built-in battery, and only communicates over a distance of about fifty centimetres with the mains-powered unit, or 3cm with my pocket gizmo. |
Steve Pampling (1551) 7956 posts |
A few years ago a colleague tested a projector system with his friend, and they watched a popular match by projecting onto the front curtains. When the first goal produced a large cheer from outside they checked and found a group of 10 or so local youths all sitting on his front garden wall facing in. Definitely a case for projecting onto walls and ensuring the walls aren’t visible to all. |
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