[PLUG] External USB hard drive "cage" under linux, reccomendations?

Keith Lofstrom keithl at kl-ic.com
Thu Oct 12 18:49:54 UTC 2006


Rogan Creswick wrote:
>Obviously, try it before you leave the country, but they should just
>work.  That said, it sounds like you'll want one that's relatively
>easy to get in/out of, and one that supports usb2.

On Tue, Oct 10, 2006 at 03:16:00PM -0700, Daniel Hedlund wrote:
> I wish "just work" was true in my experience, but unfortunately it's 
> not.  One of my friends in Australia had a generic external hard disk 
> enclosure that was USB 2.0 compatible; they bought it in Britain.  The 
> enclosure worked fine on my computer but refused to work on his or 
> another laptop.  The problem?  It would get recognized and work okay at 
> first but after a little while it would just give itself up and die.  It 
> would only do this on VIA chipsets.  The enclosure worked fine on every 
> computer I tried (about 10), but anything VIA just died.  It didn't 
> matter whether it was Linux or Windows.  It's probably not much of a 
> problem anymore with the enclosure market mature, but I would warn to do 
> some fairly robust tests (reading and/or writing a whole disk) just to 
> be sure.

I had some issues with external USB cages and Linux, which could be
similar to the problems Daniel mentions.  It was a while ago, on 2.4
kernels, and may be resolved by now.  See:

     http://www.keithl.com/usb2bug.html

My approach for on-the-road backup for my IBM T30 is to use a hard
drive ultrabay adapter.  I power down the machine, unlatch the CD and
latch in the hard drive adapter. I reboot the machine in single user,
unmount all the partitions but /, and do a:

     sync ; dd bs=1M if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdc

This copies the complete 80GB disk image at about 1GB/minute to an 
identical drive.  Since the second hard drive is easily removable
from the ultrabay adapter, it is easy to swap into the primary slot
if I lose the main drive while on the road.  I keep the spare drive
wrapped up in a ziploc bag in my dirty laundry for padding - I just
have to be careful not to wash it!  The drive plus the adapter is
very light compared to most external USB drives.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs



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