The new enclosure was about $20 more, but had the added feature of accepting a full 5.25 drive. I tested this new enclosure against Windows XP, Mac OS 9, Mac OS X, Mandrake 9.2 (kernel 2.4.22) and Mandrake 10 (kernel 2.6.3) and they all worked fine. Transfer rates on the iMac (OS 9) were a bit slow, but I suspect the machine only has usb 1.1. Everything else was nice and fast.
I originally had my (40 GB) drive formatted using FAT32, so it could be plugged into my XP machine for burning my backups to CD. I noticed transfer rates somewhat slow for this, and I unearthed some info somewhere that FAT32 was less than optimal on drives larger than 32 GB. (In fact, XP won't let you format drives larger than 32 GB as FAT32). I reformatted as ext3 and speed was much better on my Mandrake machines. I plan to install an ext3 driver on my XP machine, since it only needs to read from the disk.
I just wanted to report my success, in case anyone is searching the archives of this list in the future with similar problems. (I know that's how I stumbled on this list myself.) And thanks to Gregory for the awesome link -- very useful info there. It pretty much described exactly the setup I was trying to create.
Paul
Gregory Gulik wrote:
In my experience the model, but more important the chipset inside, makes a HUGE difference in the stability of USB. I use a couple different large hard drives in a USB 2.0 enclosure as a network backup device. I tried several USB 2.0 cards and two enclosures before I got something that's nearly 100% reliable.
The set-up I'm successfully using now is documented here:
http://www.gagme.com/greg/linux/network-backup.php
I'm using Fedora Core 2 with the 2.6 kernel now but it did work just fine with Fedora Core 1 with the 2.4 kernel as well.
Hope that helps.
Paul Siegel wrote:
Just thought I'd supply a bit more information regarding tests I've done with this thing. I'm really curious if anyone knows if this particular
brand of usb hard drive enclosure causes problems with linux or if it's all usb hard drive enclosures that are flakey. I'd gladly exchange the thing for a different brand if that were the case.
So, last night I transferred about 5 GB to the drive from an iMac running OS 9. I'm guessing the iMac only has usb 1.1, as the transfer took several hours. I then plugged the thing into a new iBook running OS X, and was able to copy down the 5 GB of stuff in about ten minutes.
Out of curiosity, I then attached the drive to my Mandrake 9.2 system, which I'm guessing is also only usb 1.1, and started copying the 5 GB down. It seemed to be going ok and it was around 10 PM, so I decided to let it just copy overnight and went to bed. The next morning at around 7 AM I checked it and it was still copying. Now, I know usb 1.1 is slow, but I should think it could copy 5 GB in less than 9 hours. More interestingly though, I thought, was that it was still copying -- it didn't hang. I guess that only happens when I try to write to the drive.
Finally, as one last test case, I plugged the drive into my Mandrake 10 system which definitely has usb 2.0. I started copying the files, and a few minutes later it appeared to have finished. However, I discovered that in fact only 18 MB had been copied, and I could no longer even access the drive until I unmounted it, unplugged the usb connection and reconnected it. My /var/log/mesages file was full of this message over and over:
Aug 5 10:38:55 localhost kernel: invalid access to FAT (entry 0xe34ba252)
Aug 5 10:40:55 localhost kernel: FAT: Filesystem panic (dev sda1)
The entry number there changed dramatically from one message to the next.
Anyway, I don't know if any of this information is helpful, but I figured I'd post it in case it sparked any ideas in somebody's head. I'd appreciate any help I can get. Thanks.
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