Some External HDD Questions

[Matt Graham]

After a long battle with technology, Jorge Delacruz wrote:
> --- Patrick C <patrick.pxc.c at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I recently bought an external HDD that hates my computer (won't work at 
> > all inside the computer, but plays nice from the enclosure).
> > 1.) Is the USB spec fast enough to run any games or other applications
> > from it?

Reports from the field say that USB2 disks run at about 20-25M/s under 
real-world conditions.  This isn't as fast as IDE or SATA, but it should be 
fast enough for most things.

> > Can anyone help me set up a UDEV rule so that this device gets a
> > symbolic link in /dev as /dev/media-external or something?

Overkill.  Put a label of some type on the device and mount by label if it's a 
removable device.  This is easy with ntfslabel, tune2fs, or reiserfstune.  If 
it's FAT, echo -n "NEW_VOLUME1" | dd of=/dev/sdX1 bs=1 seek=43 count=11 .

> > KDE's media manager working some kind of hoodoo-voodoo KDE magic to
> > automount it there (KDE can only automount things in /media).

Automounters tend to cause more problems than they solve.  Put the thing in 
fstab and forget about it.

> > basically a cut and paste job (that rule included information like vendor,
> > etc., which was obvious for the iPod, but not as obvious for this hard
> > drive. I don't know where the Gentoo people pulled it from)

They probably used the /lib/udev/usb_id program to find that stuff out.

> I booted with the USB drive connected, and it appears as /dev/sda.  Also,
> the data transfer rate is about 2 MB/sec - much less than today's hard
> drives.  It may work for gaming, but I would not count on it.

2M/s?  That doesn't sound right for either USB1 or USB2.

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