External hard drive

[guy13]

Hi all,

I'm running SuSE 9.2 on a Toshiba Sat 1410-604 laptop and am thinking of buying an external hard disk to use as a backup device. Can anyone tell me what to look for and what to avoid ?

Thanks in advance.

[skecs]

Do you have Firewire (IEEE 1394) or USB 1.1 or USB 2.0 ports on the laptop?

This drastically affects the transfer speeds - USB 1.1 => 10Mbps, USB 2.0 => 480Mbps, Firewire => 400Mbps and Firewire 800 => 800 Mbps. It is really, really, really slow transfering large amounts of data at 10Mbps! A 15GB disk image (Power Mac Dual G4 867MHz) on Firewire (LaCie 40BGB) takes about 20 - 30 minutes. The advantage is that these use the full 6-pins and power directly from the Apple motherboard - no power adaptor. The LaCie drives still need the power adaptor if USB or Windows is used - must be insufficient power in add-on PCI cards.

Using a USB 2 external case (about $30 - $60 in Australia) and 2.5" notebook drives (the largest you can afford) you can achieve the same thing - just plug and play anywhere.

If you are using this across multiple OS format as FAT32 as Linux, Windows and Mac OS X can all read and write to this file system.

Hope this helps.

[guy13]

Seems like I might be stuck with USB 1.1 but maybe I can use a USB 2.0 2-port CardBus. I'll post this as a new question just to be sure. Or is this the USB 2 external case you're talking about ???

[Guest]

dont buy ........







till you are sure what to look for and what to avoid

[youlikeicecream]

I have a 160GB USB 1/2 LACIE and it works just fine under windows and linux (Kubuntu) and is formatted as FAT32

firewire is better as it powers down with the system unlike USB drives which have to be manually switched off

Hope it helps
Mike

[skecs]

Hi,

The external cases that I use to add HDD are from Welland. I buy at wholesale but their home page is:
http://www.welland.com.tw/html/case.html

Just Google/Yahoo or telephone your local computer shop, they should be able to supply similar or the same items. You have the choice of 2.5" HDD (Notebooks) or 3.5" HDD, and with the 3.5" the choice of SATA or IDE connections to the HDD in the case.

There are also the prebuilt External HDD from Maxtor, LaCie, Aldi Supermarkets (here in Australia anyway), Seagate, and others that can have USB 2 and Firewire 800 connections. The main benefit of these is they often come with backup software (for Windows anyway) to enable easy file backups.

Hope this helps a bit more.