Using external USB2.0 HDD for backup

[Toomas Aas]

Hello!

Does anyone have good experience using external USB 2.0 HDD for backup 
with FreeBSD 6?

My current server is FreeBSD 4.11 and I've been using Amanda with 
external HDDs that connect over FireWire for past ~3 years. This setup 
has been rock solid. Back when I was building it, I chose FireWire, 
because FreeBSD 4 only supports USB 1.1 hence the performance was not 
suitable for backing up large amounts of data (dozens of GB every night).

Now that I'm planning to build a new server with FreeBSD 6 I was hoping 
that maybe I can use USB2.0 instead of FireWire. However, the first 
quick test on my home box was not very encouraging. My PC basically hung 
while tarring up /usr partition to the external USB HDD and I had to 
kill the power. Afterwards, the UFS2 partition on external HDD needed 
manual fsck. 'man ehci' says that the driver is not finished and is 
quite buggy. Maybe this is true and I should stick with FireWire. Or 
maybe it's just because I'm using el-cheapo USB hardware for testing?

--
Toomas