[conspire] would this be a good external hard drive for, my Linux Certified laptop?

Ed Biow biow at sbcglobal.net
Mon Feb 8 17:59:12 PST 2010


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From: Darlene Wallach <freepalestin at dslextreme.com>
Subject: Re: [conspire] would this be a good external hard drive for
    my    Linux Certified laptop?
> Yes - thank you very much for taking the time to look up and give
> me urls and for answering my question! I will use the link to check
>  prices.
>
> I will most likely check Costco. I don't like to purchase online.

If you don't like to shop online a good resource to check is
SalesCircular.com:

http://www.salescircular.com/ca/computer/hdiskp.shtml

Another resource to monitor is the Fry's ads if you happen to live
near an arbeit macht Fry's.  For some reason there are about 5 stores
in the South Bay within 10 minutes of each other but I'd have to drive
35 minutes to hit either the Concord of (extremely southern) Fremont
store & the situation isn't better if you live in SF or the North Bay.
http://www.frys-electronics-ads.com/
http://newspaperads.mercurynews.com/ROP/ads.aspx?advid=32664

- From a price point of view, I find Costco is seldom the lowest choice
for consumer electronics, simply because they don't discount sale
items as much as many other stores.  That said, the price is rarely
much higher than its competition and they have the best return policy
I am aware of, plus, they actually pay their workers quite well
compared to other big box stores, on the order of $15 an hour.  Fry's
doesn't pay much more than half of that to entry-level workers.  Their
labor practices are one of the reasons I was pleased to see Circuit
Chity go toes up.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circuit_City#Criticism_and_controversy
> I like the fact that the drive has firewire, which might be just a
> tad faster than USB 2.0?
Firewire is apparently a bit faster, particular for transfers of large
amounts of data.

http://www.cwol.com/firewire/firewire-vs-usb.htm

BTW, I've never seen a USB drive that Windows could read that Linux
couldn't (unless it was formatted in a file system that Linux wasn't
prepared to handle, e.g. the ntfsprogs program wasn't installed).

In fact in my experience Linux handles some USB peripherals much
better than Windows (XP, at least, haven't used 7), particularly USB
keyboards and rodents. Linux picks these things up in seconds, Windows
dithers around a lot, even if you just change the port in to which the
device is plugged.  A few weeks ago I had to go in to Safe Mode on a
friend's XP to get it to recognize a new USB keyboard (and it was a
Dell which didn't have any PS/2 ports, so it was just a new model
keyboard, a Logitech instead of a Dell).  Luckily the Administrative
account wasn't password protected. I was able to log in to a Guest
account without a typed password, but it wouldn't let me "install" the
new keyboard.

Ed
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