[SWLUG] Linux friendly USB hard disks (i.e. ones that can be ext4 formatted)

[Steve Hill]

On Mon, 19 Jul 2010, Mark Summerfield wrote:

> As far as I can tell from googling pretty well any USB hard disk will
> work fine with Linux (apart from some Seagate models).
>
> However, when I read more closely these all seemed to be being used
> using FAT32 or NTFS or whatever Mac OS X uses. The _only_ one I've found
> that someone says they've reformatted (using ext3) is a Toshiba 3.5" 1TB
> disk.

Pretty much all of them will work ok; you just need to reformat it if you 
want a different FS to what it comes with (e.g. using mke2fs or similar). 
They just appear as /dev/sd* block devices, so you can use the normal 
utilities (fdisk, mke2fs, etc).

> Has anyone on the list successfully formatted an external USB hard disk
> using ext4 or other linux filesystem?

I have a 1TB Western Digital Elements USB 2.0 disk partitioned with a swap 
partition and several ext4 partitions (it is the main disk for my 
SheevaPlug, which runs Debian Squeeze directly off the USB drive).

-- 

  - Steve
    xmpp:steve at nexusuk.org   sip:steve at nexusuk.org   http://www.nexusuk.org/

      Servatis a periculum, servatis a maleficum - Whisper, Evanescence