External USB hard drives

[mark at buttery.org (Mark Dulcey)]

Randall Hofland wrote:
> 
> Has anyone had any good experiences hooking up an external USB hard
> drive. I was looking at some and they require MacOS or Windows98 making
> me wonder if this isn't another WinModem type device.

No - what it means is that those are the mainstream operating
systems that include USB support. I think they all claim now to
support Windows 2000 as well. A USB hard drive is really just a
standard IDE/ATAPI drive with an IDE/USB interface in the box.

If you're using a version of Linux with USB support (i.e., a 2.4
kernel or a recent 2.2 kernel with the USB backport patches), the
hard drive should work with Linux as well.

But then you're stuck with the fact that a USB hard disk isn't a
very good idea in the first place. USB is too slow an interface
for hard disks. It's barely acceptable for removable devices,
where the primary use is backup (Zip, Jaz, etc.) - way too slow
for primary disk storage. USB 2.0, when and if it ever appears,
will be much better.

IEEE 1394 (aka FireWire) hard drives have started to appear -
I've seen ads for a couple of Maxtor models recently. They are
really a much better idea; the interface is fast enough to
provide reasonable performance. (The fastest currently available
1394 speed, 400Mbps, is about the same speed as Ultra-Wide SCSI.)
Linux support for 1394 is  available; it's included in the 2.4
kernels, and a backport to 2.2 is also available. See
http://linux1394.sourceforge.net/ for details. The web site
doesn't talk much about mass storage devices, so support for them
may still be shaky.


-- 
Mark J. Dulcey               mark at buttery.org
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