[PLUG] USB hard drives and Linux

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky znmeb at cesmail.net
Sun Nov 5 01:08:51 UTC 2006


Carla Schroder wrote:
> I want to buy an external USB hard drive to use for quick backups on my Linux 
> boxens- are there any Linux gotchas with these? Can I buy one without 
> worrying if it's going to work on Linux?
> 
Pretty much all USB drives work with Linux. However, some of the more
clever vendors have gone out of their way to be Linux compatible. Check
the boxes at CompUSA and Fry's, and search the web.

As to gotchas, if you're counting on using software supplied with the
drive, it probably won't work on Linux. And one big gotcha is that a USB
drive is usually formatted FAT32. If you hope to share it with other
operating systems, you won't want to re-format it. And if you need to
re-format it, you're better off doing that on a Windows system. Windows
puts some extra things on when it formats a partition.

If you plan to use it for Linux only, you're free to reformat it with
something that has Linux-specific features, of course. Big external USB
drives tend to be slower than internal hard drives, so you might want to
choose a filesystem that's optimized for a lot of writing of the type of
files you're planning to back up.



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