[Cialug] External Hard Drive

[David Champion]

I have a WD Passport 250 gb drive I got about 1 1/2 years ago. I've kept 
it formatted as-is (FAT32-ish), works fine in Linux. I just removed the 
autorun.bat so it doesn't try to get jiggy with installing it's software 
when I plug it into a Windows machine. The main drawback with the FAT32 
formatting is you can't copy files larger than 2gb to it. This drive 
seems to get enough power with every USB connector I've tried... which 
is a good thing since it doesn't have any other power options - the only 
port on it is the single mini USB port.

I've also cracked it open before to borrow the USB to SATA controller 
when I upgraded the HD in my laptop. It wasn't terribly hard, I almost 
tore my fingernails off, until I found that a thin guitar pick works 
pretty well for popping the little latches.

I have a cheap USB / PATA 2.5" enclosure I got at CompUSA, called a "Mad 
Dog" and put one of my old laptop drives in it, have it formatted ext2 
and use it when I need to copy larger files. This one also has a 
seperate power connector with a USB cable to get around the power issue 
Matt mentioned, I've only had to use that on a couple of older machines. 
It also has a 5-pin Firewire port, which is what I use when I'm plugging 
it into my older Shuttle that doesn't have enough USB power.

-dc

Todd Walton wrote:
> Is there anything I should watch out for in geting an external hard
> drive that will work with Linux?  I would think that hard drive and
> USB connection would be pretty standard and Linux could use it, but
> I'd like to make sure.
>
> --
> Todd
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