USB Drive Reliability

[Manolis Kiagias]

Jason C. Wells wrote:
> I am running FreeBSD 6.3.  I have found that attaching and detaching 
> USB drives to my box is unreliable. Is this the experience of other 
> users?
>
> Regards,
> Jason
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What do you mean by "unreliable"? Please give us more details.
If you unplug it while it is mounted, it will certainly result in a 
kernel panic. As far as FreeBSD is concerned, this is no different than 
opening the box and disconnecting your hard disk while it is running.
Other than that, I have an external USB hard disk attached to my home 
server permanently. It is on all the time, it gets mounted / unmounted 
by scripts once or twice a day. It's been running for about two years, 
and never had any problem with it. I  started using it with FreeBSD 6.x 
and is now on 7.