i intend to buy an external harddisc on a trip to germany during christmas time. yakumo looks like a very nice offer considering the relation of price and storage. but there are some bad comments on them.. are there known problem with those hdd and suse 10.1? what about trekstor? anything that you can recommend?

regards
ungua

Hi!

I don't think there should be any problem since they are supporting USB 2.0 specification. So, I think they can be mounted easily. But I don't own any one of them so I cannot tell you exactly.

Side-note:
I am also right now in Germany and I want to buy a usb hard disk. The one you have listed, do they require external power supply?

EDIT: Just translated the pages: they say they are non-removable hard disk. I was talking of USB harddisks. Are we talking about the same thing?

the two i have linked to are external harddiscs with usb 2.0-support. i don't know about power supply for the trekstor, but in the reviews of the yakumo-drives i read that they have two severe problems: that their power supply breaks, which is not a standard cable, and that these harddiscs often stop working after just a couple of days. at least that's the impression i get from those very few reviews. so the answer to your question is probably a plain: yes, they have external power supply!

regards
ungua

I am just coming from a Saturn (hope you know) and they are selling trekstor hard disks although a little higher price.

There was a sale for Maxtor hard-disks, in 99 euro, 320 gb. This is by far the best sale I have seen, and I cannot tell why it is so low.

Here is the model: http://www.maxtorsolutions.com/en/catalog/Basics_Basic/

saturn is this famous "geiz ist geil"-chain!? this is a lot of storage for the money. is it possible to buy it online? i can imagine they are sold out in a blink.

regards
ungua

Yes it is the same chain you are talking about, though I don't know if you can get it online.

PS: I just bought that It is heavy, and as I can see, it can be formatted to NTFS from Windows (no option for fat32). Unfortunately, my kernel is not compiled to support USB devices. I am going to do a Ubuntu install and check about the issues. Will report asap.

hm, i cannot write on ntfs from suse 10.1, but i haven't tried this experimental that allows it. thank you for your real-time-report!

regards
ungua

One thing to understand about a USB hard drive that you might not expect: Linux treats a USB device as if it were a SCSI device, and that means the highest-numbered partition Linux supports is 15. Just thought you might like to know before you partition those 320GB-600GB drives.

Note that I did not say "Linux supports only 15 partitions." That's not the same as what I said.

thank you for your post, jamuz. so what you said is that when i have four partitions now, i will only have a reserve of 11 partitions for an external hard drive? that's no problem, e.g. 320gb seem like a space very hard to fill for me (as once did 512mb, 8gb or 40gb - my personal pc development after the commodore amiga 500). three partitions should be enough.
just another thing: i got an usb-stick with 512mb as a present from my newspaper. i plugged it in, copied some files on it and with the message "couldn't rename .... on sda1" the usb-stick disappeared. unplugging and taking it in again wouldn't do a difference, it is not detected. isn't that a little short-lived? any known problems of this kind!?

regards
ungua

I purchased a LaCie designed by F.A. Porsche 250GB external Firewire HDD that works fine with SUSE 10.1 and openSUSE 10.2 RC1.

You're welcome, ungua.

Your comment about "a reserve of 11 partitions" is almost right. Google "hard drive partitioning" to learn about the difference between primary and extended partitions.

As for your USB stick, some of them have unpredictable behavior because they don't fully conform to the USB specifications, and some because the Linux distro's implementation of udev is not quite right. For all I know there may be other reasons too. I would try to reformat the stick; that might bring it back to life. But I would not trust it with the only copy of anything important.

Best wishes.

Hi!

As I could guess, if USB 2 is supported, there is every possibility that you will be able to work though it on linux.

PS: I formatted the bought hard disk as fat32 from linux. You can mount your usb hard-disk/stick as /dev/sda
So, as jamuz says, linux supports upto 15 partitions. But i don't understand this 'reserve of 11 partitions'. Does that mean you cannot partition it upto sda15, or that you cannot mount all of them at one time?

@anupamsr, this "reserve" was related to that i already have four partitions. so 15-4=11.
to be honest, i don't know how to mount the stick manually...!? and i don't know either how to format a usb-disc. this is a question in this thread, too, but now i cannot even format it in windows, because of a strange file (scandisc and the like won't find a problem):
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=501884
can someone help me out there!?

regards
ungua

just one real newbie-question before i leave to germany: what kind of filesystem would you recommend? i almost never use windows, so i'd like to format it exclusively for linux. but which program should i use!? does it work through yast? i went for this harddisc.

regards & merry christmas
ungua

As far as I know, any one should work. The only point to notice is, if you want interoperability with Windows, use FAT32