[PLUG] External USB 2.0 hard drives

[Garl Grigsby]

John Jason Jordan wrote:
> Turning the question around might be easier: Are there any USB drives
> that *don't* work with Linux? (I've heard of problems with USB 2.0, but
> once the user has USB 2.0 working, I've never heard of any drives that
> wouldn't mount.) If there are any, why won't they work?
>   

Yes there are. Anything based on a Genesys Logic USB-IDE chip will fail. 
I bought several external cases to use for backup based on this chip and 
the transfer would fail after transferring only a few hundred megs. 
Sometimes the failure would result in the drive disappearing, sometimes 
it would just stream errors continuously (hundreds and hundreds of megs 
in a few minutes).  There was a work around but it resulted in such poor 
transfer rates that I bit the bullet and purchased a case with a 
different chipset (sorry, can't remember which one right now...). No 
more problems. I now regularly transfer 50+ GB of data with out error.

I've only used two 'prebuilt' usb drives: 1 Seagate and one Western 
Digital. Both work fine. No errors. No problems. I use another

Garl