Fergus Wilde wrote:

can anyone recommend, from personal successful experience, any of the very large capacity (circa 1 TB) USB external hard drives for use with Linux? I ask because I cannot find a retailer in the UK who will say they will accept a return if the product doesn't work with Linux.

I think you're making life too difficult. Many retailers will accept a "no reason" return just for goodwill. *All* internet or other mail order suppliers in the UK will accept a "no reason" return because that's the law :) But in general don't expect any support from either the retailer or the manufacturer with regard to Linux. If you do want to walk in to a shop there are also retailers around who do support Linux, but you don't say where you are. I don't have personal experience of 1 TB drives but we did buy a 500 GB Seagate that suffered from the "unwakeable sleep" (their warranty is longer than most others). But it did wake up when the appropriate commands were sent from a Linux box (as posted on the web and on here IIRC). Cheers, Dave -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

Fergus Wilde wrote:

Hello all,

can anyone recommend, from personal successful experience, any of the very large capacity (circa 1 TB) USB external hard drives for use with Linux? I ask because I cannot find a retailer in the UK who will say they will accept a return if the product doesn't work with Linux. Anyone who can give me a model name/ number available in the UK would be specially useful. I would buy a simple 'fill-it-yourself' enclosure, but many of these appear to have non-adjustable limits on the size of disk they will read.

I'd also love to hear about any of the external drive ports that now seem to be going about which accept a SATA hard drive dropped in as a hot swappable connection.

While I realise that the assumption should be that these products ought to work with any OS, there seems to be some talk of some of them having firmware only addressable from 'doze, including firmware that will cause them to go into an unwakeable sleep. I don't want to involve myself in any hardware that would cast Vista in the role of a Prince Charming having to come in and wake up a Snow White drive.

Why not just buy an external drive case and then add the drive of your choice? -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

Fergus Wilde wrote:

Hello all,

can anyone recommend, from personal successful experience, any of the very large capacity (circa 1 TB) USB external hard drives for use with Linux? I ask because I cannot find a retailer in the UK who will say they will accept a return if the product doesn't work with Linux. Anyone who can give me a model name/ number available in the UK would be specially useful. I would buy a simple 'fill-it-yourself' enclosure, but many of these appear to have non-adjustable limits on the size of disk they will read.

I have a Conceptronic Grab'n'Go 750GB drive (CHD3NET). Accessible with either USB2.0 or over the network with CIFS or FTP, or it can be used as mediaserver for XBox (not used here). No issues with any of it's functions. *And* it runs Linux inside.. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

Fergus Wilde wrote:

Hello all,

can anyone recommend, from personal successful experience, any of the very large capacity (circa 1 TB) USB external hard drives for use with Linux? I ask because I cannot find a retailer in the UK who will say they will accept a return if the product doesn't work with Linux. Anyone who can give me a model name/ number available in the UK would be specially useful. I would buy a simple 'fill-it-yourself' enclosure, but many of these appear to have non-adjustable limits on the size of disk they will read. Fergus,

I am in the US, not the UK. I have had good success with 750GB Seagate Freeagent, with OpenSuSE 11.0 and an XFS filesystem. I have a "Desktop" model (USB only) and a "Pro" model (with USB, firewire and ESATA). When I plug them in they show up in /dev/disk/by-id like this: /dev/disk/by-id/usb-Seagate_FreeAgentDesktop_5QK04QLZ-0:0 /dev/disk/by-id/usb-Seagate_FreeAgentDesktop_5QK04QLZ-0:0-part1 /dev/disk/by-id/usb-Seagate_FreeAgent_Pro_9QK0EGL9-0:0 /dev/disk/by-id/usb-Seagate_FreeAgent_Pro_9QK0EGL9-0:0-part1 The "random" part is the serial number. They also show up in /dev/disk/by-label (because I labeled the filesystem). /dev/disk/by-label/UsbBackup /dev/disk/by-label/UsbMedia This becomes important because the drive name they are assigned such as /dev/sdb1 or /dev/sdc1 depends on what order they are plugged in, but the /dev/disk/by-label and /dev/disk/by-id does not. I put this in /etc/auto.misc: usbdrive -fstype=xfs :/dev/disk/by-label/UsbBackup usbmedia -fstype=xfs :/dev/disk/by-label/UsbMedia The drive spins down after 15 minutes (you can set the time with hdparm) and disappears. When my backup program runs and writes to /misc/usbdrive the correct drive spins up and is mounted in the right place. 15 minutes after the backup program ends it spins down again. You can also spin it down using hdparm. It comes formated with NTFS and a special windows driver to spin it up and a silly windows utility to set the spin down time. I reformatted to XFS which is fast and supports huge file systems. The drives in the enclosures are SATA and if need be you can remove them and plug them into another SATA interface or put a new drive in the enclosure. If you are using an earlier kernel than opensuse 11.0 then you may need to put the following into /etc/udev/rules.d/local.rules. # Seagate FreeAgent allow_restart fix (i/o errors) SUBSYSTEMS=="scsi",DRIVERS=="sd",ATTRS{vendor}=="Seagate*",ATTRS{model}=="FreeAgent*",RUN+="/bin/sh -c 'echo 1 > /sys/class/scsi_disk/%k/allow_restart'" It is vastly faster and cheaper to use these drives for backups than to use tape. Once you understand how to use them with Linux there are no worries. Bill -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org