Roy Schestowitz wrote:
__/ [ Jeff Gaines ] on Wednesday 08 March 2006 12:23 \__
On 08/03/2006 Roy Schestowitz wrote:
I ended up with the Seagate, which was also on display at the front
win- dow. Nice housing, 300GB, 7200 RPM, good packaging with both
European and British connectors, software CD for backup (Windows and
maybe also OS X, I imagine). Price was 140 pounds, but I get a 5%
discount for being a stu- dent.
You won't regret it, it's a much more reliable drive than the WD based
on statistics on uk.comp.homebuilt.
Thanks, I was deeply worried about that capricious and arbitrary choice,
which felt like more of a fallback option. The last time I was surveying
hard-drives I was much younger and WD were the top notch. Recently I heard
that Maxtor were taking some lead, but a Maxtor drive I had failed me sev-
eral months ago, just 4 days after I had purchased a brand new computer!
FWIW I bought a Maplins USB drive about a year ago - the 120 GB WD one
for about 100 quid. That didn't work with Fedora Core 1 - FC1 noticed
the drive was there but didn't recognize the device ID etc, so it
couldn't work out how big it was and just sort of gave up. I couldn't
figure how to add the right stuff to the USB device database, so I gave
up at that point.
Late last month I dug the drive out and plugged it into an FC4 system
and, just as you found, it "just worked". Here is some behavior you
might find useful:
- when I first connected it I was logged in as root with tail on the log
so I could see what went on. The drive was recognized, a directory
(WD_USB_2) was added to /media and the drive was mounted on it. I think
the mount directory name is made from the drive maker abbreviation
(Western Digital) plus the USB port (USB_1 or USB_2 - I have the drive
in the bottom port of two.
- logging out unmounts the drive, which times out and stops after a while.
- logging in spins it up and mounts the drive on the same directory.
- ssh login does not spin up or mount the drive. Nor does running a
script. As long as the drive is connected and powered on, the act of
mounting it spins it up. Umounting it causes it to time out and stop.
- I have a cron.daily script that dumps the whole system as a compressed
tarball onto the USB drive and e-mails me a report. When the drive is
more than 90% full it will start to delete enough of the oldest tarballs
to free up 10% of the drive before making the next day's dump. Its not
yet been running long enough to start deleting old dumps.
- I reckon that as long as the drive is spun down its contents are
pretty safe from anything short of a house fire regardless whether its
powered on or not. So the drive just sits on the system box, permanently
connected and permanently powered on.
- I still take a weekly DDS2 backup. This is kept in a safe place, as my
offline backup.
As I said, this is what happens with FC4 and Gnome, but I'd imagine that
SUSE
will do pretty much the same. IMO if you're planning to use the disk for
backups, then a fully automatic setup like mine is a good thing to have.
--
martin@ | Martin Gregorie
gregorie. | Essex, UK
org |
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