From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: adfas asd <chimera_god@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: best practice when using removable drives and USB enclosure?
Date: Sun, 18 Oct 2009 05:26:32 -0700 (PDT)
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--- On Sat, 10/17/09, Tim Bostrom <tbostrom@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>You should be aware that using external disks
> through USB means that
> >>SMART tools can't monitor your disks for bad
> sectors and read errors,
> >>thus if any occur you won't know till you start
> getting I/O errors --
> >>it would be almost too late by then.
> 
> Yes, this is a major sticking point.  I am doing
> backups of this USB
> RAID1 array offline, but I'd like to get SMART
> status.  Long term I
> see this going into an eSATA enclosure.  Just need to
> find reasonable
> card supporting port multipliers and a good port
> multiplier.

If you use an advanced format like ZFS (ZFS-FUSE) or BTRFS you get checksumming, which should help.