[Cialug] External Hard Drive

[Matthew Nuzum]

On Sun, May 10, 2009 at 10:05 AM, Lars Althof <lars at larch.dk> wrote:
> I got one of the small Seagate drives. It was Windows formatted (of course),
> but it was no big deal to repartition and format with ext3.
>


BTW, when you don't format them as fat32 it changes the way they work.
ext2/3 drives have permissions so simply being a member of the 'disk'
group doesn't automatically give you full access to the drive. You
need to create a folder and chown it to your user account or give
yourself some special read/write privs if you want to access it.

I have a fixed-location usb hard drive formatted as ext3 and it works
fine hot plugging. But the permissions thing threw me for a while.

If you build your own, remember that laptops can source max of 500ma
on one USB port. I've seen some drives that require twice that.
Generally the higher performace 7200 rpm drives use more power but I
even have an older 4200 that took too much power to be used.

Cheaper devices have a cord with two usb ends to work around this. It
is a hack imho and I'm really surprised it even works.

Some laptops have a special port that works with external drives from
the same manufacturer that allow them to use more power. My Dell
Latitude 4D20 and the Mac Book Air are examples of this.

-- 
Matthew Nuzum
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