On Sunday 11 January 2009, Adam wrote: > Chris Knadle wrote: > >> Thanks, everybody, for all your suggestions and advice on a 1 TB > >> USB HD. Portability is a consideration, so I'd rather go with a > >> USB drive than a networked one. > > > > There's one more thing to consider. A USB HD must be mounted in > > order to use it, where the network drive does not (although you > > can). This means you have to remember to unmount the USB drive > > before disconnecting it, or you'll get some filesystem > > corruption. > > I'm not planning on removing it very often, so I'll be adding its > partitions to /etc/fstab so they're mounted at boot.
Okay. Just remember that you need to shut down or unmount your Desktop before unplugging the drive. > > Portability isn't really an issue with a network drive > > By "portability" I'm thinking of being able to plug it into some > other box (could be any OS) and reading files from it, so I think a > USB drive would be a lot easier to connect to an unfamiliar > machine. In my experience it's just as easy in either case, actually. And in fact the "Network Drive" is more portable that way, because in that case the underlying filesystem that's used is obscured, where with USB it is not. A network drive using Ext4 but running Samba menas that you connect to it via SMB or CIFS (or a "Windows Share"), and the client OS has no idea what the filesystem used is. With a USB drive the client OS needs to support the filesystem on the USB drive directly. This is just FYI for future reference. A USB drive is still a fine choice. > > Since you'll likely only be using this for personal storage and > > not between other people, all of this probably doesn't matter > > except for the "must remember to unmount" thing. > > Yep. I'm only planning on moving it if I need to recover the files > on it, or if necessary to move large amounts of data. I don't > expect either to happen very often. Well, if you don't plan on actually using the USB drive very often, then mounting it at every boot is probably unnecessary. If it's just for backup what you could do would be to find a "graphical mounter" program (such as KwikDisk if you use KDE). This way you can make an /etc/fstab entry for the drive marked "user,noauto" so that it's not mounted at boot time but can be mounted easily by you as a normal user, and using a graphical program to do it so that mounting it is literally two clicks of the mouse. Mainly I like this because it means in my own memory it's explicit when the drive is mounted so that I know not to disconnect it. And the other thing is that if the drive is used for backup I don't want it mounted or even running most of the time. -- Chris -- Chris Knadle [email protected] _______________________________________________ Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) MHVLS Auditorium Jan 7 - Ruby on Rails Feb 4 - TBD
