Harold Weissman staggered into the Black Sun and said: > a large external USB hard drive for my backups, and was wondering if > there are any gotchas to be aware of when attempting to use such > drives under Linux. For instance, are some brands more Linux-friendly > than others? Do such drives have comparable reliability and > performance to those of internal IDE hard drives? The vast majority of USB disks follow the USB Mass Storage standards, and are no trouble at all. The main thing to watch out for is drives with "U3" partitions on them. This is something a few places are doing where the USB device has 2 LUNs, one of them read-only. The read-only part has some 'Doze utilities on it which are essentially useless. Drives set up like this will cost more for no additional usable functionality. WRT performance, USB2 is slower than IDE or SATA. You might get 25-30M/s out of a USB2 drive. Reliability should be similar, as in many cases, the disks are ordinary IDE or SATA disks with a SATA<->USB2 converter stuck into the case. Just make sure the disk has adequate ventilation; a hot disk is an unhappy disk. HTH, -- Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crud. MG's Extension: The other 10% is included in "everything," and it's recursive. Matt G|There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see

On Sat, 10 Nov 2007 19:10:41 -0500, Randy Yates wrote: > Harold Weissman <HaroldW22@hotmail.com> writes: > >> I am thinking to get a large external USB hard drive for my >> backups, and was wondering if there are any gotchas to be aware of when >> attempting to use such drives under Linux? For instance, are some brands >> more Linux-friendly than others? Do such drives have comparable >> reliability and performance to those of internal IDE hard drives? >> Anything else? > > I just got a SmartDisk FireLite #USBFLXP60 (60 GB) and it's working fine > under FC6. I did have to reformat the filesystem from vfat to ext2, and > I don't have a way to control the displayed information on the LCD > display, but these are minor problems and other than that it seems to > work great. Not a bad price either, at $53.00. Don't mean to be a latecomer here; but I've been using a few different ones with very good results. I have very good luck with the Maxtor Onetouch drives and use one for backups. I just bought a USB enclosure which takes 2 SATA drives and makes them into a JBOD just for fun and kicks and it works very well with Ubuntu as well. I have found a few enclosures that don't do so well. I also have 2 Seagate 120g drives and a smaller enclosure which you can hook up a laptop drive into. That works fine as well. I tend to format the drives with XFS and use a simple rsync based backup script. You may want to search around a bit for "success stories" with the enclosures if you go that route. I have gone into a Fry's and just impulse bought one and its worked. OTOH, I've gone in and bought another one and it did not work. -- Michael Perry | Do or do not. There is no try --Master Yoda mperry@lnxpowered.org | http://www.lnxpowered.org