[plug] USB drive

[Matt Kemner]

Hi Garry

On Fri, 21 Jan 2005, quoth garry:

> I've been playing with a USB2 hdd carrier with a 40GB notebook drive..
> Wondering if someone can expand my understanding a touch...  8^)===
> First up - it works fine. No drama. Suse 9.2.
> What I am trying to confirm, does the USB carrier abstract the
> filesystem to a generic USB storage device?

No, the carrier only abstracts the interface, so an IDE device becomes a
generic USB-IDE device, which under Linux is handled by the SCSI layer.

> It _seems_ to.. The disk is available as /dev/sdaX, but it doesn't get
> listed as a mounted drive using "df".

It should do, but maybe automount had unmounted it when you ran the df -
try accessing a directory on that drive and then running "df"

> If this is correct, the filesystem on the USB'd hdd [I'm using ext3] is
> handled by hardware..?

No, the filesystem is written to the drive as-is, and you can remove the
IDE drive from the USB caddy and plug it into your IDE controller, and
mount it as hdX using the same filesystem.

> Just tried a "df -a".. It lists the devices and mount points [uses
> /media/usb-reallylong number], but the capacity, used and available are
> all zero... And there is no listing in /etc/fstab...

I suspect hotplug and/or automount are involved here.

> If [and I've sort of mostly convinced myself here] the OS is handling
> the pseudo mounting of the USB'd drive, how do you go on a Linux box
> that doesn't try to be so windows-like?

Just add it to the fstab as you would for any other drive.

 - Matt