HD on External Enclosure - How's the speed?

[Beetle B.]

I'm thinking of getting an external USB enclosure and putting in a HD in it.

1) How do I know if the enclosure will work with Linux? Is there a list somewhere on the Web of Linux friendly enclosures?

2) What work do I need to do to get this to mount whenever I boot? I'll probably use LVM on it (I'm running LVM on some partitions on my current HD presently). Using 2.6.x kernel, with autofs for my digital camera.

3) Not really a Gentoo question: How's the performance (in terms of speed) when you have a HD in an enclosure? Comparable to if you plug it into the IDE direct?

Thanks.
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Beetle B.

Please update the table of equivalents.
A Firefox guide.

[jaccort]

How do I know if the enclosure will work with Linux? Is there a list somewhere on the Web of Linux friendly enclosures?

They generally show up as USB Mass Storage devices. Check that it's advertised as "no drivers required for Win2K, XP or MacOS" - though I doubt you'll find one which isn't.

What work do I need to do to get this to mount whenever I boot?

An entry in /etc/fstab and loading the appropriate usb-storage module at boot time. Naturally if you rolled a kernel without USB mass storage support you'll need to compile that.

How's the performance (in terms of speed) when you have a HD in an enclosure? Comparable to if you plug it into the IDE direct?

I've not done any proper testing, but I'd say very usable provided you're using USB 2.

USB 1 is painfully slow.

What I would say is that the quality of these little enclosures varies hugely - I've got one and the power supply is only _just_ able to power a 7200rpm Seagate Barracuda ATA disk with any degree of reliability. Also airflow can be poor - you might be well advised to put a 5400rpm (and hopefully slightly cooler/less power hungry) drive in there.

[Headrush]

[dgaffuri]