My wife is running SuSE 13.2 on her desktop computer. Yesterday her Seagate external drive failed. It starts to spin-up when connected to house electricity but then shuts off after about 5-6 seconds. It is the third Seagate to fail in the past two years (two of the drives connected by USB and the third by Firewire), so I’m really hesitant to give that company another try.
I just called technical support at Western Digital to see what they offered in Linux-compatible external drives. I was told “We don’t support Linux. Some of our drives might work but we don’t guarantee that they will.”
Great. That did not give me a warm and fuzzy feeling about WD.
So…
What can you recommend in a 3 or 4 TB external drive that is Linux-compatible? I think we’d prefer connection by USB unless there is a good reason to go Firewire. We are not a Windows household so the drive has to work on this computer. We have no Windows computers with which to use the drive if it won’t work with Linux.
We’re in the USA if that makes any difference as far as models available only in certain countries.
The only externals I have are Seagates, so unfortunately that is all I can recommend. I have not had any of them fail on me. However, I see that you have had them fail.
Also, I have seen elsewhere in the Forums some people have problems getting Seagates to be recognized.
I have not had any of those problems.
I have not been thrilled with WD with their internal HDs in the past few years, so I also cannot recommend them with any confidence.
But, if I get another, I will check the warranty on the particular model, first.
I will probably still tend to stick to Seagate or WD, because they supply free Diagnostic and Backup Tools that are specific to their drives, which some of the other manufacturers do not provide.
Using a external USB/e-sata dock(connected by e-sata). Using one WD 800GB and one Seagate 2000GB in it for backups. Never have any problems and never used any software from the HD supplier’s. Its just work. Linux (opensuse13.2_KDE(and 13.1_KDE)) has its benefits :).
If they come formatted exfat, then you might need to reformat as NTFS or ext4 to use with linux. But, apart from that, there should not be a problem.
One of my external drives malfunctions when connected to a particular linux system. But it also malfunctioned when connected to WinXP on that same computer. So I take that to have been a hardware incompatibility issue.
My 250G Seagate is around 10 years old and still working. A Maxtore 200G failed around a year ago. A 1T WD MyBook seems to be working pretty well, as is a Seagate Backup Plus 1T.
These are not in continuous use. They are mostly for backups. And I alternate backups between different drives. So if one of my external drives fails, I still have the backups on the other.
It’s a fact of life that disk drives fail. I’m not sure if you can pin it on a brand name. My most recent internal drives were two 1T Seagates and one 750G WD. The latter replaced a failed 320G WD.
> Hello, everyone.
>
> My wife is running SuSE 13.2 on her desktop computer. Yesterday her
> Seagate external drive failed. It starts to spin-up when connected
> to house electricity but then shuts off after about 5-6 seconds. It is
> the third Seagate to fail in the past two years (two of the drives
> connected by USB and the third by Firewire), so I’m really hesitant to
> give that company another try.
>
> I just called technical support at Western Digital to see what they
> offered in Linux-compatible external drives. I was told “We don’t
> support Linux. Some of our drives might work but we don’t guarantee that
> they will.”
>
> Great. That did not give me a warm and fuzzy feeling about WD.
>
> So…
>
> What can you recommend in a 3 or 4 TB external drive that is
> Linux-compatible? I think we’d prefer connection by USB unless there is
> a good reason to go Firewire. We are not a Windows household so the
> drive has to work on this computer. We have no Windows computers with
> which to use the drive if it won’t work with Linux.
I use WD and Seagate drives myself. Never had a problem with them,
though the included software is generally useless for Linux users.
Look for USB3 if you can, and if your system supports it.
On Sun, 04 Jan 2015 23:46:02 +0000, nrickert wrote:
> bosdad;2687236 Wrote:
> If they come formatted exfat, then you might need to reformat as NTFS or
> ext4 to use with linux. But, apart from that, there should not be a
> problem.
I don’t think they use exfat for hard drives, do they? ISTR that that was
intended for flash drives and (particularly) sd cards.
The Seagate that I just bought from CostCo was preformatted NTFS. That
is a 4 TB drive.
I really do not know, or I should say, remember. All I have ever done is plug them into the USB port, launched GParted, and partitioned and formatted them the way I wanted them. I never really paid close attention to how they were partitioned and formatted from the factory.
> What can you recommend in a 3 or 4 TB external drive that is
> Linux-compatible?
I did use a Seagate external drive but I decided to change to something
more flexible and now I’m using a couple of western Digital internal
SATA drives as external drives. I mount them in a StarTech docking
station. I back up to one drive and then unmount it and replace it with
the other drive. The docking port can be mounted to USB or eSATA port.
The model I’m using also comes with an adapter for IDE 2.5/3.5" drives.
–
Graham Davis [Retired Fortran programmer - now a mere computer user]
openSUSE 13.2 (64-bit); KDE 4.14.3; AMD Phenom II X2 550 Processor;
Kernel: 3.18.1; Video: nVidia GeForce 210 (using nouveau driver);
Sound: ATI SBx00 Azalia (Intel HDA)
A USB3 drive should also be capable of using USB2 ports. So best to buy USB3 anyway. If your local computer store has an external drive that is not USB3, then it is probably old stock.
Not in my experience. It will probably just mount the disk or popup a device notifier allowing easy mounting of the disk, and using its existing partitioning (often NTFS).
If you prefer it to use a linux file system, you would have to initiate the reformatting.
> Please excuse this “noob” question, but how do I determine if my wife’s
> computer will support USB3?
I would check the specs of the system. You can try “lspci | grep USB”
and look for “xHCI” (I believe that’s USB3, maybe someone can confirm),
but as nrickert says, USB3 devices will support USB2, so buying a USB3
device won’t hurt - you just won’t get the full performance of the drive.
I use a Samsung M3 Portable 1TB External Hard Drive (owned and manufactured by Seagate), mainly for backup over nearly 2 years now, and no problems. It supports usb3 and usb2 and works well for me on usb2. It’s completely encased with no user access to the internals.
I haven’t used the included [Windows] software . It came pre-formatted with NTFS and still is. When new, I plugged it into my lenovo ThinkPad running openSUSE and it just worked for copying files between ext4 and NTFS, and vice-versa.
In my opinion, this is the best way to do it. Using an external HD bay or docking device and installing regular internal drives is actually more sound, and when a disk does happen to fail, it is a lot less expensive to replace it this way then to buy a sealed external HD unit.
However, they are a slight bit more difficult to find, and the upfront expense is actually higher. The savings come down the road, both with the HDs lasting a lot longer, and with the replacement price for failed drives.
It will appear in the (if using KDE) list of devices on the left tab of Dolphin when plugged in (plus the connect pop-up might show). When you click on it, openSUSE will mount the NTFS file-system (if that is what it has, and I believe it does from what else I have read in this thread).
In order to repartition or reformat it, you would first have to launch a partitioning program (Yast’s partitioner or GParted, for 2 examples), then set it up as you want it.
If you are going to use it only for access from Linux, then I would suggest partitioning it and formatting it to ext4 or xfs.
If, however, you want to be able to access the data on it both from Windows and from Linux, then the simplest approach would be to keep it formatted as NTFS (that is, leave it as it came from the Factory).
Windows can read NTFS, but not the Linux filesystems, at least without tracking down and installing additional programs that may or may not work properly.
Linux, on the other hand, can read NTFS, FAT (etc.), and – of course – the Linux file systems straight out of the box.
Thanks, and thanks to Cloddy for the original suggestion you have supported. I will look into this as part of my research.
Appreciate the reply and seconding of Cloddy’s post.
