this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2024
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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

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[–] desentizised@lemm.ee 16 points 4 months ago (7 children)

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.

[–] Romkslrqusz@lemm.ee 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] desentizised@lemm.ee 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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?

[–] Romkslrqusz@lemm.ee 4 points 4 months ago

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.

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