Using a maxtor USB disk

I've recently (marts 2004) bought a Maxtor USB disk, to store my backups and help me share files between my windows and linux installation on my laptop.

Mounting the disk

All I had to do to access the disk was to connect the USB-cable to the laptop, plug in the power cable and then mount the disk.



/dev/sda1 /mnt/storage vfat user,uid=500,gid=500,noauto 0 0
Then I can mount the disk without being root.

mount /mnt/storage

Speed testing the disk

The disk seems fast enough for normal use, but I've heard rumors about switching the partition from fat32 to e.g. ntfs or ext3 will speed up data transfers.



$ time mv Mandrakelinux-10.0-Community-Download-CD1.i586.iso /mnt/storage/iso

mv -i Mandrakelinux-10.0-Community-Download-CD1.i586.iso /mnt/storage/iso
0.03s user 3.38s system 7% cpu 48.525 total


$ hdparm -t /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 4.09 seconds = 15.65 MB/sec