External hard drives


mmKALLL

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Would they be a feasible alternative to using SD cards altogether? Why/Why not? What about combining the two, say, have /home on an USB-HDD and then PND's on the SD cards? Does the OS automatically scan USB devices for files in addition to the SD cards? Would it work fluently with minimenu?


A large HDD is obviously slower with read/write operations, does the USB hinder it even more - or would it even be noticeable at all? I won't say "normal use" since the Pandora is everything but, but what kinds of operations would be clearly slower to execute using an external hard drive in favour of SD cards?


Thanks,


mmKALLL
 
You basically can split your system as you wish, tweaking /etc/fstab. It's just a matter of choice/usage.


Yes, usb drives are scanned for pnds.


No problem with Minimenu.


Why a large hdd should be slower with r/w ?


I never benchmarked the USB 2.0 port, but i'm pretty sure it's faster than SD.
 
Bear in mind that, as far as I know, this will slash your battery life by quite a chunk.
 
Bear in mind that, as far as I know, this will slash your battery life by quite a chunk.

This is exactly why I don't go this route...


But saying that, I am looking to get a small 600gb USB powered drive to backup data and store movies for when i'm out and about.


Sent from my HTC Sensation Z710e using Tapatalk
 
Also, I admit I'm no expert, but wouldn't booting with the HDD absent if you've put /home on it cause some problems?
 
If you're prepared to carry a HDD around with you, why no carry an external battery to maintain battery life too
 
Also, keep in mind that some 2.5" bus-powered drives could potentially kill your USB-port and backlight.


Using a drive as home and then logging in without that drive present have some odd side effects, but afaik, as long as the folder exist, nothing spectacular happens. I have my /home on a SD-card but I boot from NAND, so I have accidently done this a few times x]
 
Yup, you can log, but as homeless ^^.


I don't know the current draw of tiny usb keys.
 
If you're prepared to carry a HDD around with you, why no carry an external battery to maintain battery life too

Why not just carry a second Pandora battery? I always do.


It's nice to feel secure with 20 hours + in your carry bag. :)


Sent from my HTC Sensation Z710e using Tapatalk
 
I find some things don't always work from USB storage, playing Audiorace I found that the songs would not convert or play if on a HDD or USB drive, but would work fine from the SD cards, so there may be other limitations to solely using external drives.


I tend to use external drives to hold my larger ROMs that's I've ripped on my desktop, like the megacd or ps1 stuff and access the drive to swap those in and out.
 
All I know is, you can plug most every external hard drive right into the back of the Open Pandora and watch a veritable ocean of films from it on an airplane trip or long car ride. This alone is a very satisfying feature.


Running a user directory or pnd's off external HDD might give pause at first, but I think Linux-SWAT is right... the only downside I could foresee is the wait time for the drive to spin up. That and it does indeed suck battery like a vampire in heat, like from 10-12 hours to maybe 4-5.


Still awesome, depending upon your use case.
 
Nothing forbids you to plug the usb hd, to copy 10 movies to sd, then remove the usb drive and watch from sd.


I didn't tested external ssd.
 
^That's right, and 16 GB SD cards (class 10) are getting very reasonable nowadays, on the order of $18 USD in some cases, which in my opinion is not expensive enough to say you could not fill both slots.
 
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