Issue with external hard disk drives > 2 TiB

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sun, 27 Feb 2022 08:46:44 +1100, Karl Auer wrote:
>I would consider this a "not fit for purpose" matter, meaning you
>should be able to return the enclosure for a refund, but check the
>external product description carefully (or online product description
>if you bought it online) as if they actually mention this limit you are
>stuck with the device.

Hi,

I've got a personal history with enclosures. For example, another
enclosure of the same vendor let the drive fall asleep by the
enclosure's controller firmware after being idle for 10 minutes.
Without GVFS and friends installed, it doesn't get waked up
immediately by Linux for no reason. The firmware is unable to buffer
incoming data and to wake up the drive, if it was sleeps for a while,
instead it cause I/O errors. With GVFS or similar mechanism installed
the drive likely would spin down and up every 10 minutes, but unlikely
cause I/O errors. Even the vendor wasn't aware that the controller let
the drive fall asleep, let alone the dealer. IOW you can't rely in
datasheets.

My dealer would grant refund, even if the enclosure wouldn't be
suitable by the datasheet. But actually it is.

"Technical Details
    General
        Assembly For a hard drive 
        HDD Suitable for hard drives up to 4 TB 
        Power supply External 
[...]"

The problem is, what enclosure to order instead. I ordered and returned
lots of enclosures, before I found this particular one, that doesn't
cause any issue with drives that are not > 2 TiB.

What enclosures do you use?

Btw. it even is possible that an enclosure does work for one kind of
usage, but not for all kinds of special usage. I'm using enclosures to
write several tar.gz archives, each has got a sizes of around 500 GiB.
A big problem seems to be an open file, while no data is written for
several minutes, when the computer does generate the data for the
archive, before it continues to write the data to the open file. It at
least is my guess, that tar doesn't close and open the file again and
again. Maybe I'm mistaken and the culprit is something else. However,
I've got a drive with a WD enclosure that can sleep even for hours, spin
up again and write data without errors, even this is possible, if the
firmware is really smart. Sure, with GVFS monitoring this external WD
drive spins down and up again and again, the reason that I replaced
GVFS packages, by empty dummy packages.

The problem is that the firmware of most enclosures tries to be smart,
but actually "smart" firmware most of the times is faulty firmware.
Firmware that is not smart in the first place, e.g. firmware without
energy saving measures usually is the better choice.

Regards,
Ralf