Using USB Hard Drive Enclosures with Linux

Using a USB hard drive enclosure with Linux is quite straightforward and very convenient.

Setup

I followed these excellent directions, which boil down to:

Look in /var/log/messages for the new drive device (/dev/sda in my case)
Carefully check that that device is not already mounted by looking at the output of mount
Using fdisk to partition the blank drive
Using mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdaX to put an ext3 filesystem on the drive
Using tune2fs -m 0 /dev/sdaX to not reserve any space.
Using mount /dev/sdaX /mnt/usbdrive to mount the drive for use

Performance

I am using a Thermaltake Silver River Duo enclosure. It supports IDE and SATA drives, along with USB 2.0 Hi-Speed and ESATA interfaces.

When using the USB interface with a Maxtor 200GB 7200RPM Ultra ATA/133 drive I was able to write:

3.9GB in 3 minutes, 23 seconds (203 seconds)
Write rate: 153 Mbps (19 MB/s)

This is less than the advertised 480Mbps transfer rate for USB 2.0 Hi-Speed but more than enough to handle recording multiple 19.2 Mbps HDTV streams simultaneously.

Last modified on 10 Aug 2015 by AO