It's scary to think that there was a time when ZIP discs were the best portable format, before USB pen drives and SD cards. They were a lot smaller and slower than CDs, but had the advantage that the data could be selectively overwritten, rather than gradually filling up the disc with out-of-date copies of a file and then wiping the whole CD clean and starting again.
I still have an old IDE ZIP 250 drive somewhere, though I copied any data off ZIP discs long ago. I hadn't realised that the format lasted long enough for drives to be made with USB interface.
Heck when I started learning programming paper tape was the best portable format, when I started working at it 8 inch floppies were. Compared to them ZIP drives were wonderful.
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I just got about 1MB/s reading from one, that's not too bad. About a third of the speed I get from a CD-R on this PC (a CD drive from
1997, so a period test), and seemingly much faster spin-up and seek times. They've also proved to have decent long-term data integrity, which is an area that's a bit unclear with flash memory (and known to be a problem with burnt CDs).
Using one as the root parition on a Linux system though? No, I don't think that's wise. Especially compared to flash memory.
At the same time as Zip disks, Iomega also sold Jaz disks which were based on hard disk technology but with removable platters. I've got a 1GB Jaz disk here from 1996 (no drive), but I've never actually used one so I'm not sure what the performance was like. One could hope for something similar to a real HDD of the era.
10+0 records in
10+0 records out
10485760 bytes transferred in 0.318608 seconds (32911166 bytes/sec)
Mid-90s 2GB IDE Hard Disk: $ dd if=/dev/hdc of=/dev/null bs=1024k count=10
10+0 records in
10+0 records out
10485760 bytes transferred in 1.555667 seconds (6740363 bytes/sec)
Would try a floppy too (for a 1MB read instead of 10MB of course), but the drive has gone a bit iffy lately. We all know that reading a MB from one of those took a lot longer than a second though.
My first introduction to programming (in BASIC) was on a summer course for schoolchildren at ICL's Beaumont training centre near Old Windsor in the long hot summer of 1976. We had to program by writing one character in each box of a "coding sheet" which was then transcribed to paper tape by an operator, taken by road to a computer centre somewhere near Heathrow (I remember us being taken there one evening), and the results were returned as fanfold listing paper the following day. I remember another day we went to an ICL site which had a huge computer hall with orange "wardrobes", tape drives and "spin drier" removable disc drives; it was only about 15 years later when I started working for ICL that I discovered that it was "the goldfish bowl" at the BRA01 site in Bracknell; my desk in my last role at ICL was looking through the wired glass into the machine hall, though it had had its last mainframe removed a good few years earlier.
After the ICL course, my parents wangled for me to use a mini computer at a teacher-training college near where we lived. The BASIC interpreter was loaded from a very long roll of paper tape - usually by a reader that sensed light passing through the holes or obstructed by them, but occasionally by a mechanical "row of needles" reader if the fast reader was broken. It took about 45 minutes to load the interpreter using the mechanical reader.
By the time I was using the Research Machines 380Z at my next school, we had progressed to audio tape. It wasn't until I got my own micro (a Transam Wren) that I saw my first 5 1/4" floppy - 180 KB, I think: half the 360 KB of the later IBM PC floppy format on the same disk.
I decided that I could afford the upgrade from 16 KB (!) to 256 KB of RAM, but I couldn't afford the upgrade from 2 floppies to 1 floppy and a 5 MB hard drive. That was in 1981: I remember driving into central London to collect it not many months after I passed my driving test, and with only a paper map to guide me and not a satnav, of course.
The advances of technology in those 40-odd years have been staggering, but then they were just as staggering in going from the first computers used at Bletchley Park to the computers of the mid-70s.
FWIW by first encounter with computers also involved paper tape - the machine was my university's Elliott 503 (some of its smaller 803 siblings still exist at Bletchley - the 503 was a scientific computer using ferrite core and discrete transistors - and we used a Flexowriter (smaller, faster and much nicer to use than a teletype) to write and edit Algol 60 programs on paper tape.
Paper tape had one terrific advantage over cards: if the dropped the rool and got it tangled, just throw it down a stair well, put the end you'd held onto onto the winder and wind it up.
If you dropped a card deck you'd hope that its line numbering was up to date and the card sorter was working and available.
Transitors and then integrated circuits were the key to transforming a Bletchely style valve computer to a Z80....
Audio tapes - or at least wire recorders - already existed and non volatile storage developed from delay lines to magnetic cores to tape and then to disk.
Solid state non volatile storage is just a development of ordinary static RAM with an inbuilt 'battery'
ALL of this depends on access to theoretical models of quantum behaviur AND to acces to increadibly precise machine tools to do wafer level fabrication.
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Ah I merely used the word 'zip drive' in a random sense for a portable external drive, didn't remember it had any particular meaning, my bad.
It seems to be this thing:
formatting link
I figured because the USB plug is blue on the inside, it is USB 3. This external drive I have is not new, it might be from around the time that article is written (2010).
I tried to plug it in just now, while the Pi 4B was running with power from the wall socket, and it crashed the operating system. The X-server crashed, it returned to the text console, and then seemed to lock up with some kind of file system errors being printed. It accepted no input from the keyboard anymore.
Searching for 'zip drive' I now recall these things again, and used to own two or three.
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It's spinning rust drive, that is going to be slower as main OS disc than any sort of flash based medium. It would be OK for mass data storage.
It probably requires too much power, and caused a voltage dip. You'll need to use a USB hub to provide the power most types of spinning rust hard drive require.
Given the two points above, it's the wrong thing for a Raspberry Pi. If you are happy with the its physical form factor, get a USB attached SSD.
Go with the spinning rust - you might be surprised at the performance. Some people seem to think you always need the very fastest. It all depends on what you are planning to do.
Quite a lot of modern spinners work perfectly well powered from Raspberry pi's. You do need an adequate power supply. And for the 4B that means one that supply 3 amps.
"wrong thing" - how prescriptive. In 2 of my Pi cases USB attached spinning rust turned out to be the right point re. price/performance. Let's be a bit more nuanced about this.
Performance for large sequential files is fine, but for use as a system disc you need fast small random access performance, and for that spinning rust has always been bad. Hence everyone moving to SSDs on their PCs.
But this one crashes the OP's Pi.
It's not being prescriptive to point out that disk is question is not the right solution.
If you want super performance matching the latest PCs you wouldn't start with a Pi in the first place. SD cards are hardly designed to compete with HDDs for speed anyway, and the OP's issue with them is long-term reliability not speed.
When he plugs it in while the Pi is already booted. This will be due to the surge of current drawn by the HDD when it starts to spin up. When the Pi is running, the dip in voltage is enough to disrupt it. However when both Pi and HDD are powered on at the same time, the Pi is presumably in some sort of power-on reset state (a deliberate delay intended to avoid problems due to power-on voltage supply instability) so by the time it starts running the HDD has already got going and is no longer pulling too much current.
So it may not be a problem so long as the HDD is never connected to a turned-on Pi. If the OP does want to do that, a higher-current power supply may or may not be the solution. If the problem is due to the resistance of the 5V lines on the Pi's circuit board causing a voltage drop, then the beefier power supply will make no difference. What you want is a direct wired connection from the power supply output to the USB socket that the HDD connects to. Or something clever using a capacitor and diodes could work too if done by someone with knowledge of electronics.
I suppose it's both important: long term reliability (you never want it to ruin files in /home), and enough speed to run a desktop, doing some gimping and blendering, Usenetting, video playback, etc. I also have a 'netbook' (Acer Aspire One), but it can not do much, far slower than the Pi.
If you type in a webbrowser on that netbook, you will sometimes have to wait 15 seconds for the browser to catch up to where you are writing (it was running Linux with a light desktop, or i3wm). In terms of formfactor however, the netbook is easier than a Pi with whatever else you need with it (screen/keyboard, etc). Hence it would seem the Pi has a nice niche use between a normal PC, and a 'netbook' type computer.
Right, though it is fine if you boot with all connected.
That is how it looks like. The failure is not consistent, because sometimes I could still use the keyboard. This may be indicative of something random like a power dip causing undefined behavior (I guess).
In my case I may eventually want to go for the fast and large 128 GB thumb drive mentioned in this thread earlier, since it keeps things small and fast, not to mention the large size. For now I simply use an SSD card, which isn't a fast one (a rated '2' sandisk), with /var on USB 2 stick). Everything works fine for now, fast enough.
Using a big external drive does hurt the form factor. Not a problem at home, but cumbersome on the move. I had good experience taking the Pi 4B on a trip, with a keyboard, drawing tablet and LCD screen (no external drive). It does get to the point where you have a bunch of wires going everywhere. Will have to get some kind of case to fit things in, so that most can stay in it while you use it.
Also using the Pi as a normal home PC (using it right now), for when I don't need to do something requiring more power (such as 3D world rendering). It is nice how quiet it is, and that it is only using little energy.
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