[NTLUG:Discuss] External Hard Drive Recommendation

[Joel Sinor]

On Tue, 06 May 2003 11:36:41 -0500
Steve Baker <sjbaker1 at airmail.net> wrote:

> Jeff Demel wrote:
> > All,
> > 
> > I have Red Hat 9 at home and Windows 2000 Pro at work, and want to
> > get an external hard drive to carry data back and forth.
> > 
> > I'm hoping that just about any USB 2.0 compatible external drive
> > will work fine, but would like to hear any recommendations or
> > warnings y'all might have.
> 
> Depending on how much storage space you need, you might want to go
> with one of those solid state memory sticks.  I have a 512Mb Cig at r
> stick - and it works very nicely with modern Linux'en.  SuSE and
> GenToo (which are the two distro's I use) can be set up to auto-mount
> them.  Then it's just like any other disk drive.  It's about the size
> of a Magic Marker and since it has no moving parts, I feel happier
> about having it bounce around in my pocket than I would an actual disk
> drive.  It cost $48 in Fry's and with about the same capacity of a
> CD-ROM, it's pretty useful.
> 
> Of course if you need more space than that - then a USB disk drive is
> the right answer.
> 
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I have not yet jumped on the usb flash drive bandwagon, but I am glad to
hear there is one that actually does work with Linux.  I have heard many
tales of woe and gotchas associated with these, and had decided to find
one that works with Linux and use that one.  One of the gotchas I have
heard that is os-agnostic is the fact they are using flash memory for
storage.  This is typically slower than traditional hard drives and also
has a more limited life span.  I have also heard that the limitation of
life is base don transactions, so the best thing to do is to copy all
the files you want to transport at once and rather than deleting files
from it wipe it if you want files to go away.  I could be wrong on this,
but there was a long thread in one of the linux lists on this issue.
It appears these devices do not exactly work like usb drives, but as far
as they do, they work fine in Linux.  My opinion is it is a good idea to
find one people report being able to use in linux first.
As for true usb hard drives, those should always work fine.  YMMV.