[Gllug] external hard drive recommendations

Mike Leigh MikeL at hornbill.com
Wed Aug 4 08:49:48 UTC 2004


Hi,

I have a Maxtor 120gb one touch at work linked to my Win XP laptop.  There
are a couple of points about this drive that I do not like.

1)	There is a default 1 hour shutdown of the drive without activity
which I found out after going for lunch.  Of course VMWare does not like
this and corrupts your images which is not funny.
2)	In order to change the 1 hour default you have to install the one
touch drivers on a windows box.

The only thing the one touch button does is launch a user defined external
application.

If you want to see what the software / driver forms looks like then have a
look here
http://www.mikeleigh.com/temp/maxtor/maxtor_1.png
http://www.mikeleigh.com/temp/maxtor/maxtor_2.png
http://www.mikeleigh.com/temp/maxtor/maxtor_3.png

Apart from my two gripes the drive performs well and is very robust and
rugged.  Oh its also quiet as well :)

Mike

-----Original Message-----
From: Fasih Rehman [mailto:fudo at fudonet.net]
Sent: 03 August 2004 21:36
To: Greater London Linux Users Group; stuart at sjsears.com
Subject: Re: [Gllug] external hard drive recommendations


Hi Stuart,

You could just buy an enclosure and any drive you feel like. 
http://www.firewiredirect.com is good place to look, however I never 
could find reliable UK reseller info (I'm talking at least 18 months 
back.). I needed an enclosure for a DVD Writer, so I could move it 
between my Linux box and a Mac. I came across ADS Tech who sell a 
retail kit, at the time it was Firewire only, the newer ones also have 
USB2 support.

http://www.adstech.com/products/DLX185/intro/DLX185intro.asp?pid=DLX185

These are widely available Dabs, Insight etc. I bought a second one 
some months later for housing a 120GB disk. Both units works fine under 
FC2, and also on RH9 prior to me switching to FC, so I guess RHEL will 
be fine as well.

If you don't like the idea of assembling one yourself then the Maxtor 
drives do work, I use them at work however we have the older ones 
without One Touch. The drives will work fine, however I don't think One 
Touch feature will work since Maxtor have written a special driver. 
Then again I won't be surprised if there is a kernel patch somewhere. 
The Lacie portable range are also very desirable however I haven't used 
one on a Linux box, only a Mac.

Hope this is some what helpful.

Fasih

On 3 Aug 2004, at 20:58, Stuart Sears wrote:

> hi folks
> Any suggestions as to a good USB2/Firewire external hard drive?
> I've been looking at the maxtor one-touch drives but I'd be very
> interested in any other ideas / horror stories?
> The drive I buy will need to work with both RHEL 3 and Fedora Core 2
> (and ideally any linux distro at all!)
>
> ta for any responses
>
> Stuart
>
> -- 
> Stuart Sears RHCE, RHCX
> -- 
> Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
> http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug

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