Mini-Review: Generic hot-swap eSATA Docking Bay with Ubuntu
I regularly deal with external hard-drives, be it for data backup or if I’m rescuing a client’s hard-drive from uncertain death.
Since the idea of opening my PC on a regular basis to connect a drive is a bit of a turn off, I used to use an external USB drive enclosure. This works fine, but it’s a bit slow (well, at least until USB 3.0 makes its debut). The eSATA standard allows you to connect external drives at full SATA speed, but it’s not cost-effective to buy an enclosure for every external drive you have.
Enter the Docking Bay. This is a simple weighed base that allows you to connect a hard-drive in a similar way to how you used to plug in game cartridges into a classic game console like the Atari 2600. You can then eject the hard-drive and plug another one in, all without restarting the PC.
This is a review of one such Docking Bay and how it works with Ubuntu, including the wonders of hot-swapping.
LikeHowTo: Reclaim reserved disk space on non-system drives taken by the Ext3 filesystem.
I made a rather alarming discovery today, quite by accident.
Like most people, I use an external hard-drive to backup data to, or to shift things around if I’m low on space on my PC’s internal drive. Well, today that external drive reported that it was full. Damn.
So I fire up Ubuntu’s Disk Usage Analyser, aka Boabab, to find out what’s consuming the most space. I use a 1TB external drive and it’s formatted total is about 916GB, which is about right, however Boabab reported that the total consumption of data on the drive only added up to about 860GB – wtf? Even Nautilus’s Volume Properties window was reporting that the drive still had 50GB-odd free, so why is the system telling me it’s full?
I use Ext3 on my drives and, being a journalled filesystem, some space on the drive is reserved to record these journals among other functions which is expected, but 50GB worth? I did some research and found out that the Ext3 filesystem reserves 5% of disk space by default for itself! In this day and age of large drives, that’s a huge chunk of lost space!!
Thankfully there is a way to tell Linux not to reserve so much space. Read on…
Mini-Review: The Fujitsu Dynadisq III 320GB USB Portable External HDD
Actually, I tell a lie – the full title for this product is the “Dynadisq III High Speed USB 2.0 Portable Storage & Backup Solution for Fujitsu 2.5″ SATA Disk Drives” (say that in one breath 5 times)!
Title aside, this is one of yet another series of pre-packaged drive & enclosure solutions being bandied about the market today. These solutions are gaining interest with a lot of consumers because they generally manage to undercut the combined cost of buying the same hard-drive and enclosure separately, so much in fact that many users who only need the drive, buy the solution package, rip out the drive and discard the case because in some cases (pun not intended), it can be cheaper this way.
Cost aside, what if you simply need to have a cost-effective external portable backup solution with minimal hassles? That immediately calls for a notebook hard-drive that can be powered by the USB data cable.
