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Hi, I am planning to purchase a 2.5-inch HDD. If I connect it to my computer using a SATA to USB adapter instead of directly to the computer's SATA, can it somehow affect the result of this scan?
I apologize for my ignorance but I couldn't find an answer to this question anywhere
Mark my words. Don't ever use SATA to USB for anything other than (temporary) access to non critical preexisting data. I swear to god if I had a dollar for every time USB has screwed me over trying to simplify working with customers' (and my own) drives. Whenever it comes to anything more advanced than data level access USB just doesn't seem to offer the necessary utilities. Whether this is rooted in software, hardware or both I don't know.
All I know is that you cannot realistically use USB to for example carbon copy one drive to another. It may end up working, it may throw errors letting you know that it failed, it may only seem to have worked in the end. It's hard for me to imagine that with all the individual devices I've gone through that this is somehow down to the parts and that somewhere out there would be something better that actually makes this work. It really does feel like whoever came up with the controlling circuits used for USB to SATA conversion industry-wide just didn't do a good enough job to implement everything in a way that makes it wholly transparent from the view of the operating system.
TL;DR If you want to use SATA as intended you need SATA all the way to the motherboard.
tbh I often ask myself why eSATA fell by the wayside. USB just isn't up to these tasks in my experience.
I've had a usb to sata running to a 2.5" sdd that acts as the main storage and boot for my pi4b, and it's been in use for 4 years with zero issues so far.
I've now got 3HDDs attached to my Proxmox machine for NAS storage via usb ATM. It's been running since Feb. It's had it's issues but those were more my fault for not understanding the flake factor (since my experience with the sdd) I had one drive forget what I named it, so my whole Proxmox died.
But that was remedied by passing the USB straight through to OMV.
Just saying, I've not really had the same experience as you with them, they seem fine if you have an idea what may fuck up.
ASMedia is the only controller IC manufacturer that can be trusted for these IME. They also have the best Linux support compared to the other options and support pass-through commands. These are commonly found in USB DAS enclosures, and a very small fraction of single disk SATA enclosures
Innostor controllers max out at SATA 2 and lock up when you issue pass-through commands (e.g. to read SMART data). These also return an incorrect serial number. These are commonly found in ultra cheap desktop hard drive docks, and 40pin IDE/44pin IDE/SATA to USB converters
JMicron controllers (not affiliated with the reputable Micron) should be avoided unless you know what you are doing... UASP is flaky, and there are hacky kernel boot time parameters required to get these working on Raspberry Pi boards. Unfortunately these are the most popular ones on the market due to very low cost
USB can actually be ideal in some data recovery scenarios. HDDSuperClone / OpenSuperClone support a relay mode that turns a disk off and back on to regain access after they drop out, and that is reliant on a USB connection.
Will definitely check to see if I can work OpenSuperClone into my workflows. Haven't had failing drives drop out like that before so I can't speak to that scenario. I imagine if it drops out why would that software have a harder time to recover under SATA?
You should, it’s quite powerful and can work in tandem with both DMDE and UFS Explorer!
Power cycling the drive reboots and reinitializes it. I’ve mostly seen it with SSDs - you get a few dozen MB worth of reads before it drops out, unplugging and reconnecting a SATA power connector that many times would be real tedious so you automate it with a relay.
eSATA fell out of fashion when USB got faster AND eSATA wasn’t hot plug and play.
I get that. SATA can be hot plug these days. I'm not saying it should rival the number of USB ports we get on motherboards, but I remember there were also these USB eSATA hybrid ports. Which would probably only work with USB 2.0 but still, would be nice to have.