[OpenIndiana-discuss] Revive retired disks with data sets on them with vitual OI

[Harry Putnam]

Jonathan Adams <t12nslookup at gmail.com> writes:

> Probably not the most reliable, but definitely the easiest, way to get
> access to your data is to use USB disks because VirtualBox allows
> direct USB passthrough.
> My boss uses OpenSolaris with USB drives to get access to the ZFS pool
> running on his Linux system.

[...]

>> There are actually 3 pair of disks that were set up in mirrored
>> zpools: 2 @ 500 gb (Older IDE)
>>        2 @ 500 gb (oldish sata)
>>        2 @ 750 gb (slightly newer sata)
>>

[...]

Richard Elling <richard.elling at richardelling.com> writes:

> On Mar 26, 2012, at 12:34 PM, Jonathan Adams wrote:
>
>> Probably not the most reliable, but definitely the easiest, way to get
>> access to your data is to use USB disks because VirtualBox allows
>> direct USB passthrough.
>> My boss uses OpenSolaris with USB drives to get access to the ZFS pool
>> running on his Linux system.
>
> USB drives tend to ignore cache flush commands, which can appear as
> unreliable disks. Shouldn't be much of a problem if you rarely plug them.

Is the kind of size (3.5 TB) and scale mentioned above available in usb drives?
Any chance of mirrored pairs as described?