[Gllug] Backup drive for CentOS 5 remote setup

[Richard Jones]

On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 05:28:34PM +0100, gvim wrote:
> Can anyone recommend a 500GB USB2.0 backup drive which does not require onsite setup beyond plugging-in and turning on? I want to have someone attach it to a CentOS 5 server and do the rest on the command line  remotely. My current choice is:
> 
> http://www.ebuyer.com/product/149457
> 
> .... but I can't be sure it will just show up under /media once powered up. I want to reformat it with ext3 so everything should be OK so long as I can find it under /dev.

I'm pretty sure any drive will be fine.

With RHEL 5 you'll start to hit problems with drives over 2TB in size
and drives which use 4K sectors (not sure if such drives are available
as USB drives yet).  The common DOS partitioning scheme (MBR) can't
cope with partition boundaries > 2 TB, although it works (by luck)
provided all the partition boundaries are <= 2TB.  Drives which report
only 4K sectors can't be used at all, although they are not common at
the moment.  This of course is all fixed in RHEL 6.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones
Red Hat
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