advice on external HD

[dbaker]

can anyone reccomend an external hard disk (preferably one of those small passport drives) that works nicely when ext4 formatted?

a friend suggested the WD "My Passport Ultra" but he has a a mac, and after doing some googling I found this:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...765&p=13080370
so I'm not too keen on that idea anymore.

p.s. I don't want an SSD

[GerardV]

p.s. I don't want an SSD

Why not if i may ask ?
I have one with USB 3 and its very quick, almost as quick as my my sata ssd.
Other than that, the "Passport" should work just fine. I have one, left over from when i had a mac and it has given me no problems so far.
I use it now mainly to play back movies on my tv.

[millusions]

i have two, one is mostly ntfs with small ext4 partition, ntfs mostly to share with others/other computers,
and one ext4,
i cant think of a reason why an external drive wouldnt play nice with ext4
its just a disk like any other with usb interface to pc.

[life0riley]

I use a USB exterior hard drive enclosure with a SATA drive formatted to ext4. This has worked well for me.


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[dibl]

With the prices of 1GB and even 2GB hdds being what they are today, I would say get a good one and put it in an enclosure. I have two of them, one is the predecessor to this model, but they are as cheap as $12USD. Formatted ext4, they automatically mount under /media on a KDE desktop.

[life0riley]

Yep. My drive is 1TB. That's plenty of storage space, and it's good for backing up data.


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[perspectoff]

Seagate 2 Tb Slim

I have 2 of the Seagate Slim 2 TB non-powered USB drives, which I picked up at Best Buy for $119 (one was $100 on sale). They are NTFS, but Dolphin mounts and uses them automatically without problems, and I almost exclusively use them with Kubuntu.

I have both (just about) filled with hundreds of movies / TV shows. Love 'em, especially for travel, since they fit in my pocket.

One I share with my kids, who use Windows (hence the NTFS). One became slightly corrupted in a power failure, but the Windows utility chkdsk /f /r fixed it up promptly (where /f indicates to fix errors and /r indicates to relocate bad blocks).

A friend uses a smaller-capacity one with her Apple Macbook, but of course it doesn't work as well (nothing Apple works very well these days since Apple cripples all their software on purpose) and, of course, is much more expensive. I haven't tried her Mac version with Kubuntu...

I also have a separate powered Seagate 2 TB USB drive ($69 at Target) which I leave connected directly to my smart TV or DVD player and can play movies (or music or photos) directly from it. DVDs are pretty much a quaint and distant memory.

[Teunis]

I never look at the brand, just at the price and they all work nicely.
The Thinkpad came with a build in Hitachi, I added a 1TB Samsung in a caddy.

The oldest 2.5"external is one of those tiny rubber Freecom thingies with 500GB, another is a 1.5 TB Western Digital with USB3.0 and there's a 1TB Toshiba.
The last two are partitioned with both ext3 and ntfs, the 1.5 TB also has Kubuntu installed and boots on most machines.

For back-up purposes I have two more at the GF's place, don't recall the brand. Edit, one of them is a 1TB WD Passport.

I don't see the point of using ext4 on external (back-up) drives and for encryption I use Truecrypt, either whole disk (the Freecom one) or large containers.

Using a 36 MP camera is fun but it consumes large quantities of disk, in raw format the pics are almost 100MB, in jpg still some 10MB.

[millusions]

one reason i have ext4 on externals is to preserve file permissions to backups without needing to gzip everything,
yes it did cross my mind to do everything ntfs for compatibility

[Teunis]

I've never been deeply involved with file permissions but find it hard to believe they are different between ext2, 3 and 4...

[woodsmoke]

Hi
I purchased a cheapo usb external "disk enclosure" back in....don't know.... 2006?...

It is not nearly as complex as the diescription in the Wikipedia article but it appears something like this:



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_enclosure

Over the years I then purchased a variety of "small" hard drives to plug into it, and have never had a failure, although I did once, inadvertently format one of the things.

My former inconvenience, however, had a purpose purchased external in a very nice enclosure and it failed due to heat.

i leave the top of the case off. and change the drives as needed to...

a) general, short term before backing up to a cd.
b) pictures
d) documents
e) older long term storage.

Anyhow, the older drives are going the way of the dodo bird, so they should be cheap to pick up untill they are all moved offshore from the U.S. (it forces up the onshore market prices! )

What I particularly do is;

a) always store immediate stuff on a usb.
b) frequently just drag and drop from usb to the short term hard drive,
c) regularly move all files then to a cd or dvd and I also do the cds / dvds according to type, pictures / documents / with date

OH and yes, I just format to ext4, I used to always use FAT.

just some thoughts

woodsmoke

[DoYouKubuntu]

Over the years I've used hard drive enclosures, i.e., just an enclosure that I stuck my own hard drive in. Now I've segued to all-in-one thingies. I recently purchased two external, USB Transcend drives, each of which is 1TB and has military grade drop/shock resistance. I'm extremely pleased with them [so far!]. Here they are on Amazon:

Transcend StoreJet 25H3B
Transcend StoreJet 25M3

For their price, I think they're great. I formatted mine as ext4, since they shipped as FAT32 and I'm not willing to lose case sensitivity on file names.

[Teunis]

I seem to read here some people use external HD's for back-up and have them (semi) permanently hooked up.

One lightning strike or other electrical spike will destroy your original and back-up!

[DoYouKubuntu]

I seem to read here some people use external HD's for back-up and have them (semi) permanently hooked up.

One lightning strike or other electrical spike will destroy your original and back-up!

Yes, indeed! But once that happens to someone, it [most likely] will never happen again.

[jlittle]

I seem to read here some people use external HD's for back-up and have them (semi) permanently hooked up.

One lightning strike or other electrical spike will destroy your original and back-up!

Another possible event is a burglary, and original and back-ups gone. I worked with an otherwise extremely smart chap who worked on a side project for two years and lost it all that way.