[opensuse] Large capacity USB external hard drive experiences please
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. Cheers Fergus -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
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
On Friday 17 October 2008 11:36:04 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 got two Western Digital 1TB internal SATA 2 drives in a RAID 1 array running very nicely under openSUSE 11
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.
I have a Sharkoon Quickport Pro external drive bay, which can connect to the main computer via ESATA (2) or USB2, and also has two USB ports on the front and an SD/MMC/MS card reader slot. It takes SATA harddrives which drop into a slot at the top, so it's quite easy to swap them around. Mine is currently holding a 750GB Samsung HD753LJ. See: http://www.sharkoon.com/html/produkte/externe_gehaeuse/sata_quickport_pro/in...
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.
I sympathisise with your point of view :) -- Registered Linux User #463880 FSFE Member #1300 GPG-FP: A6C1 457C 6DBA B13E 5524 F703 D12A FB79 926B 994E openSUSE 11.0, Kernel 2.6.25.11-0.1-default, KDE 4.1.1 Intel Celeron 2.53GB, 2GB DDR RAM, nVidia GeForce 7600GS -- 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
James Knott wrote:
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?
Well, seems ideal I agree, but as I was saying above at least some of the free-standing cases appear to have firmware or other limits on the size of disk they can 'see'. I may be wrong on this, so if anyone has definite information to the effect that all external HD cases can read any size of disk without upper limit it would be useful to record it in this discussion for posterity, Thanks, Fergus -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
On Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 8:21 AM, Fergus Wilde <fwilde@chethams.org.uk> wrote:
James Knott wrote:
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?
Well, seems ideal I agree, but as I was saying above at least some of the free-standing cases appear to have firmware or other limits on the size of disk they can 'see'. I may be wrong on this, so if anyone has definite information to the effect that all external HD cases can read any size of disk without upper limit it would be useful to record it in this discussion for posterity, Thanks, Fergus
Fergus, We use a lot of external drives and I agree with your caution. The biggest issue with standalone enclosures is many of them do not have cooling fans, etc. Our experience is that drives 500GB or larger need cooling fans. Without them they fail. But even with cooling, there are lots of reports of 500GB and above drives have very high failure rates, so don't trust any of them to be your only copy of important data. We even had a situation a couple months ago where we had 2 copies of one data set. Both drives failed within 24 hours of each other. Luckily we swapped the circuit board of one of them with a 3rd drive and got the data back off. Greg -- Greg Freemyer Litigation Triage Solutions Specialist http://www.linkedin.com/in/gregfreemyer First 99 Days Litigation White Paper - http://www.norcrossgroup.com/forms/whitepapers/99%20Days%20whitepaper.pdf The Norcross Group The Intersection of Evidence & Technology http://www.norcrossgroup.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
Greg Freemyer wrote:
On Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 8:21 AM, Fergus Wilde <fwilde@chethams.org.uk> wrote:
James Knott wrote:
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?
Well, seems ideal I agree, but as I was saying above at least some of the free-standing cases appear to have firmware or other limits on the size of disk they can 'see'. I may be wrong on this, so if anyone has definite information to the effect that all external HD cases can read any size of disk without upper limit it would be useful to record it in this discussion for posterity, Thanks, Fergus
Fergus,
We use a lot of external drives and I agree with your caution.
The biggest issue with standalone enclosures is many of them do not have cooling fans, etc.
Our experience is that drives 500GB or larger need cooling fans. Without them they fail.
But even with cooling, there are lots of reports of 500GB and above drives have very high failure rates, so don't trust any of them to be your only copy of important data.
We even had a situation a couple months ago where we had 2 copies of one data set. Both drives failed within 24 hours of each other. Luckily we swapped the circuit board of one of them with a 3rd drive and got the data back off.
Greg
I have a Sharkoon Quickport Pro external drive bay, which can connect to the main computer via ESATA (2) or USB2, and also has two USB ports on the front and an SD/MMC/MS card reader slot. It takes SATA harddrives which drop into a slot at the top, so it's quite easy to swap them around. Mine is currently holding a 750GB Samsung HD753LJ.
See:
http://www.sharkoon.com/html/produkte/externe_gehaeuse/sata_quickport_pro/in... I might go that way. I quite like the idea of just lifting the disks in and out, as my experience to date with external drive cages is that I always end up having to dismantle
Thanks Greg - perhaps I need to revise my views and go in for 2 or even three smaller drives in their own enclosures. Or, now with Bob Williams kind help earlier in the thread: them to swap HDDs around. Thanks again for the input and warnings, Best Fergus -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Friday, 2008-10-17 at 09:56 -0400, Greg Freemyer wrote:
Fergus,
We use a lot of external drives and I agree with your caution.
The biggest issue with standalone enclosures is many of them do not have cooling fans, etc.
Our experience is that drives 500GB or larger need cooling fans. Without them they fail.
Another thing to consider is the power need by the disk itself, that can be more than what the box can supply. You have to look carefully at the specifications for both disk and box. One I bought recently burnt out in two days. Another is that the chipset usually does not allow for running SMART tests, so it is difficult to estimate the disk health; and the biggest the disk the more danger of loosing more data - obviously :-) An interesting thing is that some of those enclosures have both an USB port and a SATA port (the internal disk has to be SATA too). If you have an eSATA socket on the machine, you can save data to the disk much faster, and probably run SMART tests on it - and still connect it to computers with only USB ports, too. - -- Cheers, Carlos E. R. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.9 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAkj5RxoACgkQtTMYHG2NR9XG7QCgjx5Fzv/JkRiTMj3tjRdt5F+b gM0AnAzKmqb95MgIkB3HoeEZmoV4aNDW =Gr7e -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
On Fri, 17 Oct 2008 11:36:04 +0100, 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. 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've owned two of the Maxtor OneTouch III drives - one of them suffered a hardware failure (I probably posted here for help in recovering some of the data - unfortunately, I wasn't able to recover much). That device has two 500 GB drives in it. I still have one that I use for work and it works great. I replaced the failed one with a WD MyBook Home Edition drive - eSata, USB, and I think Firewire (I use the USB interface presently). Also works very nicely with Linux. The biggest "challenge" I've run into with USB dries on Linux isn't so much the drives, but the interfaces. I purchased an inexpensive USB 2.0 card from CompUSA, and the chipset wasn't well supported by Linux, so the card never worked properly for me. Jim -- Jim Henderson Please keep on-topic replies on the list so everyone benefits -- 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
On Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 11:36 AM, Fergus Wilde <fwilde@chethams.org.uk> 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.
<snip>
Cheers Fergus
Hi, I've been having a reasonable amount of success with the Antec MX-1 enclosures. These are eSATA and USB2, (I've only used them as USB2), and are actively cooled by a large, quiet, fan in the bottom of the enclosure. The product webpage on Antec's site indicates that they will take drives up to 1TB although I'm just using Samsung 500GB (HD501LJ) drives in them. I currently use one for my onsite server backup for when I'm doing configuration work on the RAID array and it seems to work fine. Regards Tim -- Tim Hempstead thempstead@gmail.com -- 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
participants (10)
-
Bill Merriam -
Bob Williams -
Carlos E. R. -
Dave Howorth -
Fergus Wilde -
Greg Freemyer -
James Knott -
Jim Henderson -
Theo van Werkhoven -
Tim Hempstead