Re: Some External HDD Questions

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Author: Matt Graham
Date:  
To: Main PLUG discussion list
Subject: Re: Some External HDD Questions
After a long battle with technology, Jorge Delacruz wrote:
> --- Patrick C <> 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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