1 TB of Geeky Goodness
So, I have a rather large collection of files — music, photos, etc., and lately my server, Twiki, has been feeling rather full. I solved this problem by heading to Costco and picked up a new 1TB Western Digital MyBook external HD, with USB and Firewire. All of my other drives on that box have been USB, and this was the first FW-capable drive to be added, but unfortunately Twiki’s hardware is a little on the old side, so no on-board firewire. I did, however have a card sitting in my Box O’ Parts, so I thought I’d see how Fedora 6 would handle it. Powered down, gave him a thorough cleaning (cough cough, my god the dust bunnies must have ties to their real-life counterparts — it was a mess!) Plopped the new card in, hooked everything all back up and powered it on. I let it boot up, and logged in. Lo and behold, the icon for the new drive was sitting on my desktop! I was thoroughly impressed! I hadn’t had that kind of luck with this box, like ever. I repartitioned and formatted (natch) and added it to the fstab, and did a reboot test to verify everything was still good to go. No issues! Twiki is very happy!
By the way, here’s a tip you might find useful. For hot-pluggable media that you don’t want to have move around on you every time you reboot (the /dev entry can be different depends on what order the drives get detected), a friend of mine suggested using the /dev/disk/by-id entry instead of /dev/sdXX. For this drive, the /dev/by-id entry is:
/dev/disk/by-id/ieee1394-0090a9cc933d1bbf:0:0-part1 for ieee (firewire) drive blah partition 1. Unfortunately the name isn’t very descriptive — my USB drives had names like usb-WD_4000KD_External_57442D574D414D5931373030363734-part1 which, while long, is still more indicative of being my Western Digital 400 GB USB HD. In any case, this ID should never change, so is suitable for fstab.