good external hard drives (e.g. WD Elements)?

[Steven F. LeBrun]

On 07/16/2009 09:58 AM, Tim wrote:
> Does anybody know if the "WD Elements" hard drives in enclosures with
> USB ports work with Fedora pain free?  I've heard tales of some drive
> enclosures that go asleep on you, but can't recall if it were this range
> of models, and there's some of these on sale locally for a reasonable
> price.
>
> I had some unidentifiable brand of hard drive enclosure with a Seagate
> drive in it that died on me some time ago (the drive gets multiplying
> read errors).  And I want to find a decent replacement, without a silly
> price, or a crappy fan that's going to make annoying noises or seize up.
>
> You try to be diligent, doing your backups to an external drive, then
> the backup drive is the thing to go west!  :-\  Thank goodness I have
> the original files to back up the backup...  And, yes, the drive got
> treated with kid gloves, and I don't expect hard drives to be treated
> any other way.
>
> Now I'm wondering what can be trusted as a medium for removable backups.
> I much prefer the notion of something like a drive that carries
> uncompressed copies of files, for direct access to a backup.  Rather
> than serial access tapes, or terribly slow multi-DVD collections.
>
>    

I am not sure about the WD Element but I have been using a WD Passport 
USB drive with Fedora 10 and now Fedora 11 without any problems.  The WD 
Passport obtains its power from my laptop via the USB cable.  I have 
also used a SimpleTech external hard drive (USB) successfully with 
Fedora 10 & 11 to backup my system before upgrading from 10 to 11.

The WD Passport USB drive has been formatted with two partitions, one 
for Linux and another for Vista.  My laptop came with Vista and I wanted 
to be able to dual boot but use a little of the internal disk as 
possible for Vista.  The bulk of Vista resides on the Passport drive 
with only 40 GB (minimum needed for Vista) on the internal drive.

In the year that I have this setup, I have only booted into Vista once 
every six months to make sure that Vista updates all of its patches.  
Fedora can access the NTFS partition as well as the Ext3 partition on 
the Passport.

-- 
     Steven F. LeBrun

Quote: /"One day a peacock. The next day a feather duster."/
     ---  Democrat Patrick Quinn, Illinois lieutenant governor

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