[SOLVED] Best portable USB hard drive without CD partitions?

HowardRoark · #1 19th March 2010, 08:11 PM

Hello Gentlemen:

Any opinions out there on the best portable USB hard drive to buy? I've bought several in the recent years, and although they all "work" fine, all the recent ones seem to mount extra garbage such as CD partitions that CANNOT be removed. These extra, unremovable partitions do not harm anything, but they are _annoying_ as heck.

Most drives come NTFS formatted, but that's OK since I can reformat them to ext3. Most drives come with extra worthless software on them, which is also OK because it is easily removed or gets wiped off while reformatting.

Latest drive I bought was Western Digital My Passport Essential. Nice hardware, but utterly infuriating, unchangeable partitioning. See other threads here on FedoraForum to see problems that others have had trying to remove those ISO660 partitions.

Any suggestions for good USB hard drives that play nice? (Preferably 300GB or larger.)

Regards,
HowardRoark
Running F8 and F12 on various X86 PCs

ghostdawg · #2 19th March 2010, 09:03 PM

Build your own. Buy an external enclosure and internal hard drive, slap it together and off you go with a brand new shiny external hard drive. Just make sure to check what is the maximum size drive the enclosure can handle.

HowardRoark · #3 19th March 2010, 11:22 PM

Thanks for the suggestion ghostdawg; I didn't even know such devices existed! (I knew enclosures existed, but didn't realize that they contain the electronics to convert the SATA signals to USB). I just went out and bought the components, did what you said, and the new drive is up and running! And there's a much better selection of drives and enclosures, too.

Thanks again!

ghostdawg · #4 20th March 2010, 02:12 AM

You're welcome. I'm glad you got it up and running. Do mind telling what drive and enclosure you have?

I know I usally get me a nice size drive and an enclosure with USB/Firewire, I like to use the firewire with a couple of Macs I use. I haven't tried the esata enclosures yet.

HowardRoark · #5 20th March 2010, 02:51 AM

Sure; I got a Seagate Momentus 500GB 2.5" SATA drive ($90) and a "Kingwin" KH-201U-S (shiny aluminum - no plastic!) enclosure ($15) at my local Fry's Electronics.

Total cost ($105) was about the same as that for the pre-assembled USB portable drives that are encased in cheap plastic with loads of proprietary garbage installed on unremovable partitions.

BTW, it gave me joy to see that the "System Requirements" listed on the Seagate box included the word "Linux" along with 'Doze and Mac.

The drive was pristine! Plugged it into my F12 machine, did a dmesg, saw that it was assigned "sdc", and then ran qtparted to add a single partition and format it to ext3. It really is nice when the hardware you buy is not hobbled by proprietary crap. Freedom rocks!

ghostdawg · #6 21st March 2010, 03:56 AM

That is a sweet external you have now. I like getting the aluminum case myself. I've bought only one pre-built before and it was a 250gb WD My Book when it first came out. I haven't bought one since but have put together quite a few.

I also needed an external cd drive for my mini mac when i first got it in '05 and needed that special chipset for the case to work with it. It also has firewire.

I wish there was a local Frys in MO. They have some decent deals at times.