External SATA Docking Station Compatible with Linux
 

Hi,

Can anyone recommend a docking station that is compatible with Linux?

My plan is to use it for backups. It must support 8TB or higher 3.5 hdds. Interface to workstation can be USB3 or SATA. Support for SSDs a bonus, but not necessary.

Anyone?

My guess is they would all be compatible. What have you looked at already?

I have tried "SHARKOON DriveLink Combo USB3.0 harddisk-adapter for 2.5"/ 3.5"/ 5.25" IDE og SATA via USB 3.0". It is being advertised as compatible with PC and Mac, which may be correct, but it is not working acceptably under Arch Linux. Using Sharkoon, Dolphin sees only 40 GiB of the 7.28 TiB available on the disk. Transferring files with rsync from the command line fails after about 600 GiB.

While products often work well under Linux even though Linux is not mentioned by the manufacturer, this is a case where the manufacturer's info about platform seems to be fully true.

I have been eyeing the latest Icy Box, which also only mentions PC and Mac. Given my experience with Sharkoon I am hesitant to order it.

So I am still interested in knowing whether there exists a viable modern SATA or SATA/USB docking station solution for Linux users.

The way a usb external works is almost no different than the way a usb flash drive works. I see no reason it can't work properly unless some issue between the drive and enclosure. The way linux accesses a usb attached drive is not drastically different than a windows or qnx or other machine would work.

There may be some issue with power, power settings, and maybe usb3 that would affect the SHARKOON but I'd guess the majority of linux users could use it.

Only one time have I seen an odd issue on a usb drive that simply didn't like a ext4 format while it worked great under ntfs in linux.

The other times I have seen poor support for usb 3 in the distro. That all has mostly gone away.

After my last post I found a retailer who states Icy Box will work under Linux. I will report developments ;)

Meanwhile I have no doubts about what you, Jefro, write, except to say that I had no luck with the Sharkoon. In addition to what I said earlier, the device also disappeared from Dolphin as soon as I entered the attached drive, but I could access it, in Dolphin, via root (/media/drivelabel) as well as from the CLI. The disk has ext4. Perhaps things would have worked better with NTFS.

Hi

I have a couple of Icy Box cabinet that work well in Linux (2 and 4 bays). I had a problem with a 2 bay cabinet and big disks. I think it was 2x6TB, but it reported some weird much smaller size. This only happened using the USB3 interface. Connecting with eSATA solved the problem.

Edit: One thing I didn't like about them, is that if you configure it RAID 1, and one drive fails, you get no alert. Some lights change on the box, and some have a little LCD display which will change. But there is no beeping or anything, and the OS will not know about it. A NAS box is just a little more expensive, but on those you can configure it to send email when a disk fails. And most of them has USB3 or eSATA as well.

I was planning to use the docking station just for stowaway backups, but I seem to be out of luck. I have now tested the Icy Box (model IB-121CL-6G), but apart from being able to receive some more files, it ends with the same message as with Sharkoon:

rsync: write failed on "/media/BUP_SEC/moromappe/Funnet/Klovn.txt": No space left on device (28)
rsync error: error in file IO (code 11) at receiver.c(393) [receiver=3.1.1]

What now? Should I return the Icy Box, or is there something I am missing or could tweak in Linux?

Another thing: Neither Dolphin, nor du and ls are able to see more than 155 files, while close to 1300 files were transferred before rsync gave up.

Hi Guttorm,

what do you mean connecting with eSATA? Is it just a cable, or do you mean eSATA disks (which I am not in the mood to buy... ;) )?

I had a USB to SATA enclosure which did not let me run smartctl on hard drive.

Well, I came across this in Ubuntu Forums
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2146500

See post 2: "Just forget USB docking stations. The contained Display Link chips won't make you happy on Linux. In fact there are drivers but no support for the desktop."

That tallies with my experience. Unless somebody has a solution, I'll take the advice.

<< flash of '98 >>

You might get an idea from Redhat's website. They publish the list of pieces they support if you buy their support service. I would think that could provide a baseline of devices you might try. VI

External SATA Docking Station Compatible with Linux is not the Docking Station they are talking about on Ubuntu forums (link above).

No, but the quote is so 'generic' and describes my experiences, so it might as well be.

Thanks for the pointer, village_idiot!

You are about hooking up hard drives, they are talking about displaylink. Totally different things.

I agree with this. If "fdisk -l" isn't showing the partition then is the partition faulty? Can you connect it internally to a machine to confirm the adaptor is at fault?