[ale] Recommendation for a portable USB drive for Linux

[Lightner, Jeff]

RHEL6 saw the drive (presented it as /dev/sdc) and saw it had an NTFS partition (/dev/sdc1).   I gather from other reading one has to download and install Fuse ntfs-3g to be able to mount NTFS on Linux.

Rather than do that I used fdisk to change the partition type to 83 (linux) then layed out an ext4 filesystem on it and was able to mount it fine.   Last night I started a copy of 192 GB from another filesystem to the usb drive and on checking this morning see that took nearly 2 hours to run but did complete successfully.

The drive is USB3.0 and USB2.0 "100% compatible".  In the syslog on attachment I saw the following USB messages:
Dec 14 15:58:27 atlpgpd1 kernel: usb 1-3.1: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 5
Dec 14 15:58:27 atlpgpd1 kernel: usb 1-3.1: New USB device found, idVendor=1058, idProduct=0740
Dec 14 15:58:27 atlpgpd1 kernel: usb 1-3.1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=5
Dec 14 15:58:27 atlpgpd1 kernel: usb 1-3.1: Product: My Passport 0740
Dec 14 15:58:27 atlpgpd1 kernel: usb 1-3.1: Manufacturer: Western Digital
Dec 14 15:58:27 atlpgpd1 kernel: usb 1-3.1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice

I'm wondering if this is saying it is using USB 1 driver rather than a USB 2 driver of if this 1-3.1 is just a package version of some sort?   I'll be investigating that shortly but if anyone knows already feel free to chime in.





-----Original Message-----
From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of Jeremy T. Bouse
Sent: Wednesday, December 14, 2011 10:48 PM
To: ale at ale.org
Subject: Re: [ale] Recommendation for a portable USB drive for Linux

On 12/14/2011 10:19 PM, David Ritchie wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 4:19 PM, Jay Lozier <jslozier at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 12/13/2011 03:55 PM, Lightner, Jeff wrote:
>>
>> They've just handed me a WD My Passport Essential SE 1 TB USB drive to put
>> on one of our RHEL boxes.   The WD site doesn't quite say they don't do
>> Linux but it also doesn't give any guidance except "call your Linux
>> distributor".
>
> Which means if you can't make it work, our tech support folks really
> are clueless about this
> new-fangled Linux stuff, so don't ask.
>
> I would expect it to Just Work, myself...
>
> Best regards,
> Dave

        From my experience and knowledge, the WD USB drives over 720GB required
a Windows only (possibly Mac I can't recall) driver in order to work and
was impossible to use with Linux unless you were good enough to try and
reverse engineer the driver and do the kernel development to get it to
work for Linux. I have a 500GB My Passport that I use regularly without
problems. Also this knowledge was prior to the USB 3.0 supported models
so I can't be certain if the info I had was still accurate with those. I
just stayed away from them because I'd heard they were trouble.





Athena(r), Created for the Cause(tm)
Making a Difference in the Fight Against Breast Cancer

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