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Assumed an external usb 3.0 hard drive isn't at all a very good solution to install a system (linux) on, are there specific drawbacks of installing a Zfs filesystem on Usb 3.0 external hard drive?

And does the system you are installing (windows, linux, solaris, openindiana..) make any difference?

Steiner
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1 Answers1

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Your general result will depend on:

  • Hardware support (for example, illumos/OpenSolaris does not yet have fully working USB 3.0, so it will be slower)
  • System support (for example, SmartOS will not write to the disk while running, so you can use even some cheap USB sticks, while Linux will want to write many times if not configured differently)

Please note that those are independent of the file system in itself. ZFS does not complain about a USB drive at all, because it assumes all disks can fail. There is just a higher probability of failing with a USB disk instead of a SAS disk (connection and speed loss mainly), but that does not mean that it would work differently. See for example this blog post about creating a RAID from such disks.

user121391
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