My Book Essential WD external HD 1 TB

[irlandes]

I bought on my last trip to the States, a MYBOOK Essential WD external HD, 1 TB, at a good price, or so I thought. Not that I remember the amount, it just wasn't much IMO.

I am not a newbie, but this is such a basic question that I should know the answer without asking so I put it on the newbie thread.

I believe, not sure, that I can take this HD, and break it up in partitions, just like a big internal disk, with partitions in ext3 or 4, ntfs, fat 32 (limited to 32 GB, I believe) and use it for multi-booting like Saikee does (and I have done for years now, though not hundreds of boots.)

Is this true?

I have not installed Smart Ware, at least I don't think so, heh, heh.

If so, I do not need the technical details, those I have done a number of times and if it is the same, then I can handle it.

I guess I just want some reassurance from someone who is not guessing as I am, before I attack my new HD. Thanks for any advice.

I know it will be slow, but I am retired.

[trilarian]

The only difference from setting up as an internal is to change the bus type. In your BIOS you may need to place USB (assuming that is the bus type) ahead of any internal hard drive. Install should pick up your external fine by default, unplug your internals if you are paranoid. Same concept of booting a usb stick, except you have 1TB of a playground.

[saikee]

I can confirm that a bare hard disk, inside an external enclosure, can have be used exactly like an internal hard disk, regardless of the manufacturer, the typre (IDE, Sata or SSD), capacity (for up to 2TB but see my later comment on 3TB) and size (2.5" laptop size or 3.5" for the desktop).

My confirmation is based on my experience of using the mobile rack which is a device installed inside the PC box to accept rapid change of hard disks (while the PC is off) originally with a casing but nowadays just the bare drive. I have even modified a few 3.5" IDE external hard disk enclosures by fitting the same mobile rack to them. Therefore for years I have been using a hard disk regularly either as an internal drive and external drive (via a USB, firewire or eSata connection). Many of my hard disks have over 50 partitions and work as expected both internally and externally.

One can buy an adaptor tray, that accepts a 2.5" laptop size hard disk, that has the same dimension and connector as a 3.5" hard drive so that it could be plugged into a 3.5" bay. Nowadays there are also hard disk docking stations available to enable either a 2.5" or 3.5" bare hard disk directly from a purchase (For Sata disks the connector is identical in both sizes) to be plugged in and connected to a PC by either or both USB and eSata connection.

A hard disk connected externally via a eSata connection works exactly as an internal hard disk regardless if it is an IDE, Sata or SSD. Since a eSata connection is on the same internal Sata bus an operating system (both Linux and MS Windows) would not know anything different from an normal internal bus. I have run both MS Windows and Linux on an external hard disk (via eSata connection) while there is no internal hard drive in the PC.

For both USB2/USB3 connection it is on a different bus and may not boot. This is because all MS Windows have been deliberately written only bootable from an internal hard disk. Linux can boot from an external hard disk if it has been arranged to do so (by having the initrd compiled for such purpose).

Apart from booting I don't bother much how the hard disk is connected. A USB connection is good for hot swap but slow if it is a USB2. eSata works roughly as fast as an internal Sata hard disk but the connector may not be hot swappable. USB3 now runs nearly as fast as the internal hard disk but you do need the USB3 interface both in the PC (cheap add-on cards available) and the external hard disk.

When I am cloning a hard disk , say with 2TB size, I would want the fastest speed so I will hook up the unit as either internally or externally as a eSata or a USB3 to cut down the transfer time at least by half.

I have routinely opened up sealed external hard disk enclosures and use its bare drive in the way I prefer as sealed hard disks are nearly as competitive in price as the internal bare drives but also easily available in large size. Think 4TB external drive has been available for a while while 3TB bare drive is still unavailable.

My 3TB hard disk, bought in a USB2 enclosure, was stripped this way and I have been using it internally as a network drive (accessible by all computer in the house via RS232 or Wifi) or as a eSata or as a USB2 or USB3 with or without its casing.

Finally a normal operating system cannot address a hard disk larger than 2TB if its sector size is 512 bytes. Seagate overcome this problem by configuring its USB2/USB3 interface to read and write in 4k sectors (Goflex series fitments). The >2TB disk can operate seamlessly as a USB2 or USB3 externally but not as an internal hard disk unless a GPT partition table is used. Normal hard disks are partitioned to the scheme known as MSDOS partition table (maximum of 4 primaries).

Hope the above helps.

[irlandes]

Oops! I checked to see if instant notification was on, it seemed to be. So, being busy I simply waited for an answer, and thought there was none. So, for some reason notification didn't work. Sorry to neglect the responses.

I did plunge in one day and play with gparted, and set up a FAT partition of 100MB, with the rest still ntfs.

Kubuntu 10.04 Dolphin does open up with both partitions shown.

So, I guess the only thing I am not clear on is Kubuntu putting each 512byte cluster in the 4096 cluster with a lot of slack on each cluster? I think I will make a note and look at it with hexedit and I can tell for myself, right?

Thanks for responses. I will look at my profile again to see about the notifications.

[trilarian]

So, I guess the only thing I am not clear on is Kubuntu putting each 512byte cluster in the 4096 cluster with a lot of slack on each cluster?

For a 1TB drive you can keep the old 512 byte sector size. You only need to consider increasing sector size when capacity > 2TB. Having a smaller sector size allows for more efficient storage of small files. A 600 byte file would take 2 sectors - 1024 bytes of your disc (with 424 allocated but not used) with a 512 byte sector size. On a 4k (actually 4096) byte sector size, the same file would occupy 1 sector using 4096 bytes of your disc with 3496 bytes allocated but unused.

Even when not at a barrier, sector size can be tuned to better suit the computer's needs. If you have a box that will be for storage of large files 1GB+, then a large sector size will reduce overhead by requiring less sectors. On the flip side, if you are running a web server with many small size files, smaller sectors will reduce wasted space and increase both speed and storage capacity.

512 bytes has become the best average up until the 2TB+ capacity.