Hardware - external drive questions 2radical - 02.06.2006, 04:41 Uhr Titel: external drive questions
I recently saw an ad for an external USB 2G HD for $40 & thought that would be a good solution for backups. I would appreciate any suggestions on this as I haven't done anything like this before. I wonder if it will be detected at boot & will the fstab be updated or do I need to do that manually. Are there model recommendations for linux compatibility? What backup method would be best for copying? Thanks, kurt.
devil - 02.06.2006, 07:01 Uhr Titel: external drive questions
kurt,
check, if the drive supports usb 2. if its usb 1.1, dont buy it, it would be very slow.
otherwise it should give no problems. sometimes theses disks are formatted a tad strange, so that they need to be formatted again.
for backups i simply use:
cp -avx /media/whatever /media/whereever
greetz
devil
2radical - 02.06.2006, 13:50 Uhr Titel: RE: external drive questions
Do you mean format with reiserfs for example and should I also use a -p switch to preserve attributes & timestamps?
thanks
gardyloo - 02.06.2006, 20:25 Uhr Titel:
2radical,
I'm not quite sure if I understand your description of the hard drive. If it's only 2GB, that's *tiny*. For about $45 (which includes shipping), you can get a 40GB hard drive from Newegg; for about $20, you can also get a hard drive enclosure which will hold the hard drive, and interface it to USB2 (or, a bit more rarely, but still certainly extant, to firewire).
If you mean that it's a thumb drive which holds 2GB, that's probably a very good price you quoted. As devil28 says, though, make sure it's USB2, and not USB1.1 (just for the speed factor, which I think is considered to be about a 40x difference).
I'm probably giving too much advice (that's a typical problem of mine!).
Good luck!
slh - 02.06.2006, 23:56 Uhr Titel:
USB 1.1 is limited by design to 1 MB/s, current S-ATA consumer hdds can achieve up to ~70 MB/s - external USB 2.0 enclosures usually decrease that to about 30-35 MB/s (firewire can be a bit faster).
2radical - 03.06.2006, 02:01 Uhr Titel:
My box doesn't even have USB 1.1, just 2. And yeah, the drive that I saw is one of those tiny ones. I will check out newegg.com as I've bought stuff from them before & was pretty impressed with how fast they delivered & the cost. If it's that little money, then it only makes sense to go for more capacity. As it is now I only have 40G internal HD & a bay for another one. I don't know what you mean by interfacing it to USB2, though.
rich.bradshaw - 03.06.2006, 09:39 Uhr Titel:
USB 2 is backward compatible with USB 1.1 by the way.
Interfacing to USB - he just means you can buy a normal internal drive (which are cheaper) then buy an enclosure, where you put the drive. This has a USB lead on it, so you can connect the whole thing as if it was a prebuilt USB external drive. This works out a lot cheaper - and you have a good drive if you ever want to put it internally (its faster inside as USB is slower than SATA)
But if you are using a thumb drive then none of that is that useful!
2radical - 03.06.2006, 14:18 Uhr Titel:
OK that explains it. I think I'll go that route since I haven't bought anything yet. It'd be nice to have the extra capacity, and I already have an avaliable slot for another internal HD. Thanks for the advice.
kb0hae - 05.06.2006, 00:49 Uhr Titel:
Hi Guys. H haven't looked lately, but a few months ago the proce difference on NewEGG between a 40gig Western Digital hard drive and an 80 gig (both with 8 meg cache) was only $6.00. Naturally I spent the extra $6.00 to get the 80 gig! I will only buy Western Digital drives, as in my experience (your milage may differ) they have been more reliable than other brands. Always go for the largest drive (with the largest cache) that you can afford! If you get an 80 gig, I would use that as your internal drive, and make the 40 gig a USB backup drive .
TTYL and good luck!
h2 - 05.06.2006, 03:42 Uhr Titel:
Also, you can now buy a 2 gig compact flash usb stick for about $50 if you shop around. Smaller, lighter, more durable. But you'd regret it, 2 gig isn't going to do much for real backups for long, even if you only backup /home. That's why the 2 gig usb hard drive is on sale, they are dumping them because 2 gig is obsolete for usb compact hard drives at this point, I think 4-8 gig is the norm now.