Success/fun with new Fantec 500GB USB external Hard Drive

English Hardware
1

My Canon HF S10 camcorder eats up hard drive space like it is going out of style, when taking videos at its AVCHD 1920x1080 @ 25MBit/sec resolution/frame rate. Hence it became clear I needed a small portable hard drive with enormous storage capacity to take with me when traveling.

Our local PC store had a Fantek Fanbox DB-228US with a 500GB drive , so I chose that. Visiting their web site confirmed they claim Linux compatibility.

The drive is reasonably small (16mm x 79mm x 128mm). It come pre-formatted as NTFS, and fortunately in this day and age with the NTFS-3G driver, that NTFS formatting is less of a complication than it once was.

The USB cable that comes with the drive is similar to that of the older Seagate 80GB small external hard drive that my wife and I have been using for a few years, in that it is a bifurcated cable with two large USB connectors for connecting to the PC, … one for data and one for extra power. And then there is a small “mini” USB connector on the other end of the cable for connecting to the external hard drive.

The very first thing I did was plug in the drive to my openSUSE-11.1 PC, and I was greeted by this popup:
http://img229.imageshack.us/img229/1690/newharddrive0.th.jpg](http://img229.imageshack.us/i/newharddrive0.jpg/)

Sigh … It appears possibly during manufacture’s testing, they did not unmount the drive properly. So I unmounted/disconnected the drive under openSUSE-11.1 Linux, and then physically plugged the drive into a WinXP PC. It mounted OK there. I then (in the lower right corner of the WinXP PC desktop) told windows to remove the drive. Windows removed the software connection. I then physically removed the drive from the Windows PC, and plugged the drive back into my openSUSE-11.1 Linux PC. The drive hot plug auto-mounted properly this time.
http://img5.imageshack.us/img5/4788/newharddrive2.th.jpg](http://img5.imageshack.us/i/newharddrive2.jpg/)

I had read/write access to the NTFS drive !!
http://img5.imageshack.us/img5/5697/newharddrive3.th.jpg](http://img5.imageshack.us/i/newharddrive3.jpg/)

I note above some bizarre “System Volume Information” directory on the drive, presumably put there by MS-Windows.

But the drive works well, and I need to go now and update the openSUSE HCL for external hard drives (located under gagets !! ) that the drive functions fine with openSUSE-11.1.

Here is how it appears under “My computer”:
http://img10.imageshack.us/img10/1043/newharddrive4.th.jpg](http://img10.imageshack.us/i/newharddrive4.jpg/)
it is the NTFS drive with 465.8 GB of storage.

2

Some more information, the command “lsusb” gives this for the drive:

Bus 007 Device 004: ID 04fc:0c15 Sunplus Technology Co., Ltd

Searching on this, I note some bug reports raised back in 2007 wrt this device. So in the past two years, likely thanks to the efforts of some Linux users to raise bug reports, this device has been made Linux compatible.

Here is how it looks under fdisk -l :
http://img523.imageshack.us/img523/6196/newharddrive5.th.jpg](http://img523.imageshack.us/i/newharddrive5.jpg/)

Here is how it looks under df -Th
http://img25.imageshack.us/img25/9191/newharddrive6.th.jpg](http://img25.imageshack.us/i/newharddrive6.jpg/)

3

The first thing I generally do with such drives is to create a ext2/ext3 file system on it :slight_smile:
The other day I got a 1TB drive from Verbatim (but internally, it showed a Hitachi label) and it came with some Windo$ backup software. Anyway, I didn’t bother to check what it was.

4

I went through a phase when I used to do that. But then the reality of most my family and friends and work associates being on MS-Windows caught up with me, and I found using ext2/ext3 restricted my ability to help them (via loaning hardware … ) . Some of them rely on me a lot, and so I decided in the end their PC well being (even if on windows) was more important, and I somewhat sadly reformatted back to FAT32, and later NTFS.

The NTFS-3G driver (that a user called “broch” put me on to - I have not heard from him for a long time) was a blessing to me. It made my life much easier wrt data storage of large files (of which I have many).

5

Lee, I was interested to read this. I have been in a few help threads over ntfs usb drives which offer that first error message about unclean unmount from windows.
I guess it’s kind of handy you had a Box with XP on it.

What if you didn’t have XP? What would you have done?
I wonder if a format would do it?

6

If we did not have XP ? Probably the very first thing would have been to go out and celebrate that I had finally converted my wife to Linux rotfl! … but on a more serious note, most likely I would have knocked on a neighbour’s door, or on a friend’s door, and had them plug the drive into their winXP PC or Vista PC (I assume Vista would do the same). The main reason I keep the drive formatted as NTFS is to possibly support them, so in this case I would have been the one asking a favour from them (instead of the other way around).

I think a re-format would have worked, but I would hate to reformat a brand new drive without first proving the drive worked.

7

By the by, there is an ext2 driver for Windo$ too :wink:
Ext2 IFS For Windows
Since I don’t use Windo$, no experience.
We use such external drives for back up and I don’t generally need a journalizing filesystem on that. So ext2 is enough. Also, I manually mount such drives with “noatime” flag to reduce the number of writes.

8

So we can say that most of external hard-drives work properly in openSUSE, right? Anyone who tested sth with eSATA plug/connector? Btw, I’ve successfuly tried A-Data 256GB USB disc on Milestone 2 recently. :shame:

9

All USB based drives should work because the USB Mass Storage driver is very generic and all manufacturers follow that standard. That is why, a lot of other devices like still cameras, video cameras, mobile phones etc. are also working because the driver is the same.
However, certain USB devices will initialize only once when they are powered on (externally powered ones). Such devices must be first connected to a running machine and then powered on.

10

Does “Fantek Fanbox” mean it has a fan? The thing that worries me most about these external USB drives is their life expectancy in those tight little cases. I’ve had two give up the ghost in two years, although the often high ambient temperatures in Australia probably don’t help. Wouldn’t trust them with important files unless backed up regularly to something else.

11

To my knowledge, that is just the company’s name. I gave the link to the spec’s on the hard drive & case I purchased. There are also english translations to the page:
FANTEC GmbH - 2.5" hard drives

12

That’s alright, ich kann deutsch lesen :slight_smile: