External USB Hard drives?

[emh]

I was wondering if USB hard drives work with Linux?  If so, what brands should I look for? If somebody could tell me where I could find such information, I would appreciate it.  I've already tried the hardware database for Mandrake Linux, and they don't include external hard drives as a category.  But if anyone has one working with Linux, I would like to know about it.

[Ice-9]

I have one working with Red Hat 8.0 and i worked before with SuSE too.
It's a Iomega Peerless 20GB, the drive was plugged at installation and all I had to do is mount the FAT32 partition afterwards as sda4.

Also the University from Leuven just tested the external firewire drives, also from Iomega, for compatibility with all kinds of Red Hat flavors and it worked flawlessly too.

[heljy]

I have one of those USB keychain flash memory. How do I mount one of those under linux?

[Ice-9]

Ok this is just a guess but it should be seen as a USB mass Storage device by your system.
You should be able to define a mountpoint and mount it to it just as you would do with a regular hard drive.

#mkdir /mnt/usbflash
#mount -t vfat /dev/sda /mnt/usbflash

sda should be completed by a number indicating which  partition you'd want to mount.

Edit : just stumbled into some sites that mention specific Linux drivers for their usb flash devices.
You might want to look at the manufacturer's website if there are any Linux specific drivers too.

[ December 02, 2002: Message edited by: Ice9 ]