[TriLUG] [OT] External disk storage

[Pat Regan]

William Sutton wrote:
> A friend of mine is looking for some external hard disk units (nothing as 
> big as a snap server or nas, just a disk in an external enclosure).  What 
> brands/models do you trust & reccommend?
> 

I can tell you what *NOT* to buy :).  A while back I bought my
girlfriend a USB 2.0 3.5 inch hard drive enclosure for her laptop.  I
assumed (wrongly) that they would all stick close enough to the
usb-storage specifications that there would be no issues.

The enclosure is a Sabrent brand (nice looking aluminum deal :p) with a
Genesys chipset.  I would stay away from anything with a Genesys
chipset.  I had to modify a header file and recompile her kernel to make
it work.  I forget the filename, but it had workarounds for particular
chipsets.  The annoying thing was that there is already a workaround for
a chipset with the same ID in there already, and it is different than
the one for this enclosure :p.

The other odd thing about this particular enclosure is that it uses a
USB cable with 2 host ends.  Meaning that you can't use any old cable
with it, and some poor shlub could accidentally plug both ends into a PC
which might cause very bad things to happen.  I didn't even think that
this was something to look for :p.

It works fine once the kernel is patched, but it makes it useless if you
want to be able to plug it into random machines :p.

Pat
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