On Mon, 8 Oct 2018 02:49:19 +0000 (UTC), bob prohaska 
declaimed the following:

>
>It's understood that "normal" USB hard drives can't be powered
>directly from the Pi and require a separate power supply. I just
>started wondering if anybody is making ultra low power mechanical
>drives that _could_ be powered directly from the Pi's USB port.
>
>A 2.5" drive that drew little enough power to be driven from the
>Pi might be a viable alternative to flash storage. Is there such
>a beast? 64G or 128GB would be large enough, 32 GB is  slightly
>too small.
>

 I ran a benchmark about two+ years ago which required significant swap
space to complete; otherwise the Out-of-Memory monitor would kill it
(somewhat strange, since the program was designed to take a failure from
malloc() as signal to shut down and report results -- and that part worked
on a No-OS embedded system). After killing an SD card, I bought a small 1TB
drive.

 That drive worked on both the R-Pi3 and a Beaglebone Black.

 It has no provision for separate power. USB only.

  Seagate Backup Plus Portable (model SRD00F1) 1TB.

 I was powering each processor card with a wall-wart supply, not from a
computer connection (Beaglebone Black is designed to use either a separate
5V supply, or USB client port -- the USB client port also mounts as a
network connection but I preferred to use the standalone Ethernet port)


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 Wulfraed                 Dennis Lee Bieber         AF6VN
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