[LUGSB] a question about hard drive

[Jiansheng Huang]

Hi, 

I plan to install a linux system on my machine. Before
I install a linux system, I would like back up all my
files in another hard drive. 

I would like to assemble an external hard drive
myself. This means I will need to buy an internal hard
drive and a external drive chassis. But i don't know
what I should be aware with the specifications (e.g.
width, interface ...) of them so that they can
actually put together. Has anybody done this and would
be able to share your experience? Thanks in advance.  



=====
Jiansheng (Jason) Huang

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>From greggles at optonline.net Fri Sep 19 21:14:50 2003
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Date: Fri, 19 Sep 2003 21:14:13 -0400
From: greggles at optonline.net
Subject: Re: [LUGSB] a question about hard drive
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Buy an external USB drive shell, and the drive separatley. You will save $$$ this way. Do you know if your motherboard has USB2 support? Hope that it does, or buy a USB2 card for $15 to achieve higher transfer speeds. Or, you could just get by with the standard USB, USB1, which is painfully slow. Make sure that your hard drive shell is for 3.5 inch drives. 2.5 inchers are laptop hard drives, and they're outrageously expensive. As for the hard drive, get something of at least 80 gigs. Newegg.com has em for $80 with free shipping. You can get a better deal, but it's only a little better, and you have to juggle rebates. Make sure your hard drive is IDE or EIDE (same thing) and it'll probably say ATA 100/133. As long as it isn't serial-ata, or SATA, you'll be fine. Get that stuff, assemble it (5 minutes or less), and plug it into your computer. Most modern operating systems will already have drivers, and your drive will show up in My Computer. If windows doesn't see the device wh
en you plug it in, unplug it, install the included software, and you'll be good to go. Don't install the software that comes with the hard drive itself. And when Windows asks you to format the drive, make sure you format it as FAT32, not NTFS. Most linuxes don't fully support NTFS. 

Good luck, and we'll see you at the meeting.

-Greg Z

----- Original Message -----
From: Jiansheng Huang <jihuang_ca at yahoo.com>
Date: Friday, September 19, 2003 7:42 pm
Subject: [LUGSB] a question about hard drive

> 
> Hi, 
> 
> I plan to install a linux system on my machine. Before
> I install a linux system, I would like back up all my
> files in another hard drive. 
> 
> I would like to assemble an external hard drive
> myself. This means I will need to buy an internal hard
> drive and a external drive chassis. But i don't know
> what I should be aware with the specifications (e.g.
> width, interface ...) of them so that they can
> actually put together. Has anybody done this and would
> be able to share your experience? Thanks in advance.  
> 
> 
> 
> =====
> Jiansheng (Jason) Huang
> 
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
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