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

[Chris King]

On Mon, July 19, 2010 17:25, Steve Hill wrote:
> 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).

Just avoid anything that has hardware encryption, like the Seagate/Maxtor
BlackArmor drives - they usually need special Windows software to
lock/unlock the drive.

(The BlackArmor was pretty horrible on Windows as well, if you had
anything like PGP or TrueCrypt installed - but that's a Rant for another
day).

The same also goes for most hardware-encrypted USB sticks - about the only
exception I've found to this is the uber-expensive IronKey, but even then
the unlocking/locking procedures are command-line rather than GUI.

>> 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).

Yes, I've done similar with various USB hard disks. For the most part,
they're just treated as generic USB devices under most operating systems
and don't need any special drivers or set-up.

Chris

-- 
Chris King
http://www.csking.co.uk/