[ltp] External hard drive failing?

[Jeffrey Taylor]

On 6/12/22 10:03, Stefan Monnier wrote:
>> I have a Verbatim external USB 3.0 hard drive.
> [...]
>> The ports are USB 2.0.
> If this is really a "hard drive" (with actual rotating disks inside
> rather than, say, flash memory), then a common problem is that those
> disks can occasionally (often during spin-up) require an amount of power
> that's beyond the max power delivered by USB-2.0 (~2.5W).
>
> For this reason, many USB-2.0 enclosures provided 2 USB connectors (one
> for data and one for extra power) or some other way to provide
> additional power.
>
> USB-3.0 pushed that limit to 4.5W which largely solved the problem, so
> your enclosure probably expects all the power to come from the one port.
>
> Of course, a USB-2.0 port is allowed to provide more than 2.5W, and
> disks don't always eat up more than that, so in practice a single
> USB-2.0 port often works fine, tho it might depend on luck (and it
> might work unreliably, and depend on factors such as the current
> machine load, ambient temperature, the age of the captain, ...).
>
>> This is a USB only hard drive.  Not an SATA in an enclosure.  I will try
>> cleaning the contacts.
> I've never heard of any USB-only HDDs.  AFAIK they are always some kind
> of SATA drive inside some SATA<->USB enclosure.  Some of those
> enclosures are not designed to be easily opened, admittedly, but I've
> never heard of ones where you can't get the underlying SATA drive out
> with a bit of determination.
>
>
>          Stefan
>
Yes this is a spinning rust drive.  Should have mentioned the hard drive 
has its own power supply.  Yes, I suppose I could dismantle it and pull 
the drive and put it in a enclosure I don't have.  Replacement while it 
is still working, even if not all the time, seems the best solution.  
This is my on-site backup drive with a couple years of rsnapshot 
history.  The off-site backup to Amazon Web Services S3 has only current 
files, no history.

Jeffrey
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