Thomas Lunde wrote: > (Sorry for resurrecting an old thread...) > > On 2/20/08, Joshua Radke <josh at radkeland.org> wrote: > >> The punch line >> is that I've retired the drive for live use, and will be using it for >> backups instead. >> > > > I've been bitten HARD by this in the past and strongly urge you not to do this. > > When you need your backup, you'll really need it. Do you want to find > out at that point that it was a bad drive and you didn't _really_ have > a backup? > > My $0.02 > thomas > Perhaps an update is in order. As it turns out, the other external disk I had started with the USB resets after it was a bit more full, so I'm chalking it up to a problem with the motherboard ... or something. Since the other disk is formatted directly as ext3 (instead of ext3 on LVM), the reset has no effect on running applications other than them suffering an approximately 10 second pause. Also, the backup in this case is less critical than in an enterprise situation (home MythTV setup). Speaking of reliability of backup media, does anybody have suggestions on verifying the integrity of external disks? Unfortunately, I cannot check SMART status on either of these disks (afaik ... I've tried, and there seems to be some problems with smartmontools on USB disks?). Does running an occasional e2fsck --force and badblocks give a good indication of disk health?