[PLUG] USB hard drives and Linux

John Jason Jordan johnxj at comcast.net
Sun Nov 5 04:45:06 UTC 2006


On Sat, 4 Nov 2006 16:48:44 -0800
Carla Schroder <carla at bratgrrl.com> dijo:

> 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?

First, you made another sale of your book the other day. A copy now
resides in the bookshelf behind me. :)

As for USB drives, as others have noted, they "just work." At least on
my Ubuntu Dapper amd-64 machine they do. I plug one in and Nautilus
pops up a browser window. All I had to do was create a mount point
"/media/usbdisk" and mounting is a snap. Both of mine are formatted
ext3, the same as the hard disk partitions on my computer. 

But having said that, I have some problems that make me wonder. For
example, if I use Kdar to make a backup, half the time the computer
locks up solid -- no keyboard, no mouse -- in the middle of a backup.
It seems to happen mostly when Kdar is chewing on a large file. A
couple of times I have had lockups just copying large files to and from
the USB disk, i.e., with Nautilus. Is there a problem with the USB
driver? I can't say. I know I have googled and never found any major
complaints. If my problems were caused by a bug in the USB driver you'd
think there would be serious screaming all over the Linux forums. So do
I just have flaky drives? One is the original drive that came with this
computer. The other is a Pocketec sold specifically for backing up
laptops. And I can also add that my USB ports work flawlessly otherwise
-- my mouse has never failed me, for example.

It's all a mystery to me. All I know is that I don't trust backing up
to my USB drives. Before I do I make sure I have saved all open files
and closed all programs other than what I'm using to back up the data.
If it's going to lock up at least I'm ready for it.

What I really crave is a hard drive I can stick on my home ethernet
network. They're kind of expensive, though.



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