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

[Mark Summerfield]

On Mon, 19 Jul 2010 17:25:22 +0100 (BST)
Steve Hill <steve at nexusuk.org> 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).
> 
> > 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).

In the end I bought a Seagate 250GB USB 2 Expansion Drive. I didn't
partition it, just did mkfs.ext4 and e2label & changed the ownership to
my user a/c. I've only just started using it with rsync today, but it
seems to work:-) Still, it is annoying that h/w manufacturers don't
seem to certify things for Linux.


-- 
Mark Summerfield, Qtrac Ltd, www.qtrac.eu
    C++, Python, Qt, PyQt - training and consultancy
        "Programming in Python 3" - ISBN 0321680561
            http://www.qtrac.eu/py3book.html