On Thursday, February 09, 2006 @ 1:23 PM, Ken Schneider wrote:

On Tue, 2003-11-11 at 16:45 -0500, Maura Edelweiss Monville wrote:

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I have a 4-year old DELL desktop with a heavy CRT monitor that I'm going to give away soon . I also have a 2 month old laptop. Both computers run Linux/SuSE. I would like to buy an external disk to save most of my s/w development now residing on my old desktop. But I would like to be able to use it also with my laptop. Both computers have some USB ports so I daresay an external USB disk would be fine .. I'd appreciate some suggestion about a USB reliable, large capacity but portable, external disk or any alternative solution.

Thank you in advance. Maura

1st - please check the clock/time on the machine your wrote this email on, it is off by over two years.

2nd - This was just discussed on this list in the past week. Please search the archives for all of the answers given at http://lists.suse.com/archive/suse-linux-e/2006-Feb/0857.html

-- Ken Schneider UNIX since 1989, linux since 1994, SuSE since 1998

As Ken says, this was just recently discussed on this list. Here are a couple of general/high-level things I got out of the discussion. 1) It was mentioned that the drive is better having its own built in fan to cool the drive. Many don't. Depending on the environment you're working in, if the room temperature doesn't stay reasonably cool, the built in fan would likely add life to your drive. 2) If you buy an enclosure/caddy instead of just a single unit/hard drive box, you then have the flexibility to swap in different hard drives. With mine, you just buy an extra tray any time you want to have another mountable drive. Buy a tray, buy a drive, and mount it to the tray. Then, at least on mine, you swap the drives out by using a key to unlock the drawer, slide out one drive, slide another one in, and then re-lock it. It takes about a minute to swap drives. Even if you don't think you'll need the extra capacity now, you might down the road. Greg Wallace

On Thursday, February 09, 2006 @ 11:33 PM, Gracia Littauer wrote:

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With mine, you just buy an extra tray any time you want to have another mountable drive.  Buy a tray, buy a drive, and mount it to the tray.  Then, at least on mine, you swap the drives out by using a key to unlock the drawer, slide out one drive, slide another one in, and then re-lock it.  It takes about a minute to swap drives.  Even if you don't think you'll need the extra capacity now, you might down the road.

so what's the name, rank & serial number of this wonder ;^) ?

I bought it off of the usbgear web site (www.usbgear.com). You can do a search there for "removable rack" and find it. I got the one at the top of the search results page. It's ATA USB 2.0. and it's made by a company called Coolgear. There may be better ones around. As a matter of fact, there's one for SATA drives on the same page at about half the price. I'm not very knowledgeable in this area, but I thought SATA would be more expensive than ATA, in general. Not sure what other differences there could be (they both have internal fans). This one I got works fine for my purposes. Greg Wallace

On Fri, 2006-02-10 at 11:54 +0000, Kevanf1 wrote:

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Wow, I wish I lived near to you. At 4 years old that PC is still a youngster compared to some of mine :-))))

Cue threads on who has the oldest PC running with SuSE on it.... I think my oldest is about 8 years (AMD K6-2 450mhz). I have one older (Pentium 166MMX) but it's not used anymore. --

I write this on a Gigabyte PII 350 with two 128 DIMM and an IBM 20gig 5400rpm drive. I figure its at least 8 years old. -- ___ _ _ _ ____ _ _ _ | | | | [__ | | | |___ |_|_| ___] | \/

On Fri, 2006-02-10 at 18:44 +0000, Kevanf1 wrote:

On 10/02/06, Carl William Spitzer IV wrote:

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On Fri, 2006-02-10 at 11:54 +0000, Kevanf1 wrote:

...

...

Wow, I wish I lived near to you. At 4 years old that PC is still a youngster compared to some of mine :-))))

Cue threads on who has the oldest PC running with SuSE on it.... I think my oldest is about 8 years (AMD K6-2 450mhz). I have one older (Pentium 166MMX) but it's not used anymore. --

I write this on a Gigabyte PII 350 with two 128 DIMM and an IBM 20gig 5400rpm drive. I figure its at least 8 years old.

I'm glad I'm not alone now :-)))

I wish my PIII was working as reliabily it now fails to recognize its original 40gig drive when the PII let me do a full install. The only thing I can not do on the PII is make the DVDRW work. Otherwise this little Gigabit works like a champ. -- ___ _ _ _ ____ _ _ _ | | | | [__ | | | |___ |_|_| ___] | \/

On Friday, February 10, 2006 @ 8:34 PM, James Knott wrote:

Maura Edelweiss Monville wrote:

...

I have a 4-year old DELL desktop with a heavy CRT monitor that I'm going to give away soon . I also have a 2 month old laptop. Both computers run Linux/SuSE. I would like to buy an external disk to save most of my s/w development now residing on my old desktop. But I would like to be able to use it also with my laptop. Both computers have some USB ports so I daresay an external USB disk would be fine .. I'd appreciate some suggestion about a USB reliable, large capacity but portable, external disk or any alternative solution.

Well, judging from your email date, that Dell must be at least 6 years old by now. ;-)

I recently bought an Adaptec 3.5" USB case for $20 (CDN). It will hold any 3.5" IDE drive.

Looks like this beats the heck out of my USBGEAR device for a lot less money. I did say I was not very knowledgeable in this area, so I'm not surprised that there are better options available than what I suggested. Greg Wallace