USB hard drive for backup?

I'm a retired engineer and a brand-new member. I like what I see so far. I have dual-boot arrangements of SuSE 8.0 with Windows on a couple of machines but would like to go to Fedora and should do some serious backing up. The desktop machine has an Intel AL440LX ATX motherboard with a 266-MHz Pentium II processor and 2 USB 1.x serial ports. The laptop is a Dell Inspiron 2550 with a 1.7-GHz Pentium processor and 2 USB 2.0 ports.

I see an ad for a 250-GB hard drive (La Cie FA Porsche, which accommodates both USB 1.1 and USB 2.0 interfaces). Of course it says, "for Windows/Mac"; is there experience out there with using such a device with Linux? If so, is there more I need to know?

Many thanks.

I dont have any experience with the drive you named above. But generally all USB HDDs that I have come across till now have worked in Linux.

I have a couple of those LaCie drives. They work very nicely with recent distributions of linux (currently Kubuntu 6.06). I have them formatted as ext3, and use them for backups.
Mine are USB & firewire and the firewire connection is much faster than USB (about 800Mb/minute as I recall).
HTH

Thanks a lot. I'll go ahead.

I don't know your budget but NewEgg is having an amazing sale on the 500 GB version of that drive. Current price = $180. For half a tera, that's amazing.

Note: USB 2.0 only, no 1.x or Firewire

Thanks, J.W. The price is great, but I do need 1.x for my old desktop machine.

As to the comment on RH9, I assume there's not a similar problem with Fedora Core 6, right?

Backing up through USB 1.0 takes a long, long time. The speed will not be any faster than 500 Kilobytes a second because of filesystem and USB overhead. I have backed up through a USB 1.1 and it is not fun because it took days.

Firewire is much better at handling sustain data rates than USB. Adding both USB 2.0 and Firewire is very cheap.

All USB 2.0 devices are backwards compatible with 1.1.

So do I buy a card to add USB 2.0 and Firewire? If so, what do I call it? And where can I get it?

Originally Posted by alhale As to the comment on RH9, I assume there's not a similar problem with Fedora Core 6, right?

You are correct -- Fedora Core is the successor to the original "Redhat Linux", and FC6 is current and up to date. The reason I include that comment in my sig block is because Redhat is probably the best known Linux company, and for people who are brand new to Linux, they may figure "Well, I'll just download the latest version of Redhat (RH9) and see what this Linux stuff is all about". That's perfectly understandable, but unfortunately, it means they will be working with a distro that was originally released in early 2003, and hit its end-of-life in April 2004. As a result, they are (unknowingly) penalizing themselves by using software that's been obsolete for several years, plus is far less secure than more modern distros. Overall, under those circumstances their first impression of Linux will probably be under-whelming, and for all those reasons I want to try to discourage its use. Just to be clear - Redhat Linux was an excellent distro in its day, and my comment is not intended as criticism of either it or the Redhat company. I just think it's important to try to encourage people to use current, supported distros rather than discontinued distros that are no longer supported.

For anyone interested in more about Redhat's history, I'd recommend the Wikipedia article on Redhat Linux as a good overview.

Red Hat Linux was a popular Linux distributions assembled by Red Hat until the early 2000s, when it was discontinued....... Since 2003, Red Hat has discontinued the Red Hat Linux line in favor of its new Red Hat Enterprise Linux for enterprise environments and Fedora Core for the free version. Red Hat Linux 9, the final release, hit its official end-of-life on April 30, 2004, although the Fedora Legacy project continues to publish updates.

So do I buy a card to add USB 2.0 and Firewire? If so, what do I call it? And where can I get it?

I think that for you to buy a USB2 card (&/0r Firewire if you get a drive that supports it) would be a good idea. I just went to the local computer place and bought the cheapest card I could find (that day, it was a "Belkin"). I plugged it into my PC, linux loaded the appropriate modules and I was happy. If you are using an old distro of linux, you may have to set up the required modules yourself - but there'll be help on this board.
HTH