Re: [opensuse] Large capacity USB external hard drive experiences please

Greg Freemyer wrote:

On Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 8:21 AM, Fergus Wilde wrote:

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James Knott wrote:

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Fergus Wilde wrote:

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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