Fortysomething Geek

Over the past 9 or so months, I've been accumulating various USB 3.0 sticks. I usually get them on discount at Frys, NewEgg, or Amazon. I usually have a discount alert tracker and if it falls under my threshold, I usually pick a few up. For 16Gb, I target 10ドル-15. For 32Gb, I target 20ドル-30. And for 64Gb, my price threshold is 50ドル.

I did splurge on a SanDisk Extreme Flash 64Gb for 75ドル; thinking a name brand made a difference. It turns out, that particular has problems of four distinct different PCs with USB 3.0.

So, today, I am going to give you some of my thoughts on some of the various USB 3.0 sticks you see that often pop up on sale.

I use these sticks for all sorts of uses. Namely, shuttling VM files via sneakernet. They also make good portable installers where I load them up with app installers or portable programs that run off USB. Lastly, they can be used as bootable operating systems and rescue/recovery systems.

Glancing at the picture below, I'll highlight some of the different sticks I've purchased.

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Ever since the floods of Thailand, I've been hoarding drives as they go on sale. Just for me, I probably have over 60TB of drives in various sizes. These 4TB Backup Plus drives were dirt cheap the other day on Amazon for 140ドル. 7200 rpm, SATA III 6Gbp/s and Thunderbolt upgrade-able.
These external drives usually cost much,much less than their internal counterparts. There are plenty of youtube videos on how to crack open these enclosures for you to use as internal drives.

I may just want to upgrade my Drobo 5D and replace all the 3TB drives.

I haven't had much time to post. Once I get drives, I'll see how this 100ドル RAID box compares with a 850ドル drobo.
Initial testing with old 500gb drives look promising.

People often ask me for an opinion on what hard drive to get. They need something simple, portable and good enough to carry their music collection.



My blog pretty much covers fast drive setups such as SSDs and Thunderbolt but for most people, they want something with more storage at a reasonable price.

My recommendation would be the portable Seagate Go-Flex hard drives.

They come in 5400 rpm so they aren't blazing fast but they offer great flexibility and they often go on sale. 1TB normally goes for 70ドル and can be as low as 60ドル (discounted at Target). Why do I like them?
Well, I like the detachable end-piece that allows me to connect drives to a variety of different computers.

Picture below is an illustration of what I mean.
You can get end piece connectors that swap out for any computer configuration.

• Firewire 800 adapter
• USB 3 & 2
• Thunderbolt
• and even eSATA

I have an old Mac Mini and FW800 is the way to go. Some of my PC's have USB 3 so the USB 3 adapter comes in handy. The end pieces are easy to replace and there are even 3rd party docks and adapters that work with the Go Flex drives. You can even park them in and convert them into NAS drives as well. The great thing about Go-Flex is that you can use the adapters on other 2.5" laptop drives. Hence, you don't have to worry about future proofing your investment.


I have 8 of these drives and so far, they work great for storing music and files.

Since hard drive prices are still insanely high after the Thai floods, I have resorted to buying cheap external drives. I simply remove the drives from the enclosures and use them bare.


These drives cost around 110ドル-120 which are cheaper than their internal counterparts. I'm still flabergasted that external drives cost less than internal drives. Seagate now supposedly uses the 3TB ST3000DM001 7200 rpm drives in these enclosures.


The only downside is that you lose your warranty. With one year warranties on most drives, I am willing to take those risk for my personal archival needs. These will be great in a Drobo 5D I plan to get.

I recently built a FreeNAS ZFS RAIDZ box for my personal backup archives. I wanted something elegant and low powered with the ability to run ZFS. FreeNAS is a NAS appliance built on FreeBSD. It supports the ability to run the ZFS filesystem and can be booted off a small flash storage like USB or Compact Flash.

I selected the following components:

• 6 X Hitachi 2TB 7200rpm Desktars 3.5 " drives
• ASUS E35M1-I Mini-ITX Motherboard with an AMD dual core E-350 and 8GB of RAM.
• LIAN LI Silver Aluminum PC-Q25A Mini case
• FreeNAS-8.2.0-RELEASE-p1-x64 (r11950)
• 8GB internal Patriot USB stick as OS boot

A few notes on my setup:
The ASUS E35M1 is a low voltage netbook AMD Fusion CPU (same one found in the Thinkpad X120E) and supports six SATA 3 6Gb/s ports. The LIAN LI PC-Q25 case can hold up to seven 3.5" hard drives. Five of those seven drives can be hot-swappable.

Here are some pictures of my build.The fit-n-finish on the LIAN LI is pretty impressive. The machined aluminium is well made. This case was clearly designed to be a HTPC or NAS box. It fits well in my Apple - Macintosh environment. Except for the logo up front, it is one slick looking piece of gear.



Picture below depicts drives loaded up. There are five hot-swappable bays. I had to put this to real world practice by taking out drives while the OS was running and without rebooting! The backplane is pretty interesting since it uses molex connectors for power.





With 8GB of ram, I have enough to run ZFS and RAIDZ; giving me roughly 9TB useable space.



After my build, I started to notice some degraded RAIDZ errors on my 3rd disk. Disk #3 seemed fine. I zeroed out the data and booted a different OS (Linux Mint) and copied files with no integrity issues. I tried the drive in different computers and everything checked out fine (S.M.A.R.T) and other scans. However ZFS zpool was giving me checksum errors. Well, it turned out to be a case of "silent data corruption." Linux Mint and Ubuntu did not see any problems but FreeNAS was able to give me a good heads up. It turned out to be a bad SATA cable. Once replaced, everything was fine.

In terms of performance:

Running a short DD benchmark,I was getting 263-268 Megabytes per second on the internal bus. This is pretty decent considering it is a RAIDZ disk array.

 [root@RAIDZ] /# dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/RAIDZ/test.dd bs=2048k count=10000 
 10000+0 records in 
 10000+0 records out 
 20971520000 bytes transferred in 74.518446 secs (281427232 bytes/sec) 
 [root@RAIDZ] /# 
 [root@RAIDZ] /mnt/RAIDZ# dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/RAIDZ/test.dd bs=2048k count=10000 
 10000+0 records in 
 10000+0 records out 
 20971520000 bytes transferred in 76.008326 secs (275910826 bytes/sec) 
 [root@RAIDZ] /mnt/RAIDZ# 
 

In short,

268.3899230957 megabytes

263.1290683746 megabytes


Through the network, I was getting 60-80 MB/s. This may be due to the Realtek 8111E gigabit controller on-board or the fact I was testing during the middle of the day with 60 other people on the network. I was hoping to get closer to Gigabit's theoretical limit of 125 MB/s so I may experiment with a dual NIC Intel card in the future..