Using External USB Drive for Linux Installation

Bruce Dawson jbd at codemeta.com
Thu Dec 30 11:45:01 EST 2004


On Thu, 2004-12-30 at 11:17, Mark Rousseau wrote:
> Any suggestions on External drives to get/avoid?  Is speed a major 
> issue.   This will be for a development/learning  workstation.

I haven't found a "fast" external USB hard drive. I'm not sure why not
(480MBps should be fast enough), and until the last 3 months, I've found
reliability to be a problem with external USB hard drives.

However, my experience is limited, and I never bothered to isolate the
problems to USB drivers in older kernels (2.4...), buggy
hardware/firmware in the drives, or buggy USB controllers.

But, my last ION drive and Maxtor OneTouch drives have been reliable.
Just not as fast as the internal IDE drives.

Oh, one other thing: experience tells me to keep everything else off the
controller that you have the external drive on. Speed and reliability
improves dramatically (but still not as good as a internal IDE drives).
This is likely to improve in the future.

--Bruce

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