Two or three user-customisable buttons, and one for power on / graceful shutdown would be nice. Along with user-customisable LEDs.

Hi egon.

I've the same drive and experienced the same issue from a cold boot. I followed Martin Michlmayr's suggestion of adding a reset command at the end of my u-boot boot command. This way, when it doesn't boot first time, it will reset itself and will then boot successfully on second attempt.

I use the following:-

Hope that helps.

Hi mhtsaras, good to hear you're pleased with the WD My Passport Essential 500GB drive overall. I'm very happy with mine so far, although I havn't put it to as much use as you have as yet.

I've an ext2 partition (for boot), swap partition and ext3 partitions for root and home directories. I havn't done any real benchmarks as yet but will try to run some samba file transfer tests tonight and post the results.

Just wanted to confirm, the WD My Passport Essential Ultra-portable 500GB is working like a charm. I've written (and read) ~40GB of data with it and no problems at all.

Thanks pingtoo!

I ran into this problem this morning whilst setting up my first Sheeva plug, preparing it for Debian Squeeze. Your patched version worked a treat!

I just noticed that model of my drive does not exactly match one of those listed on the WD knowledge base pages. In fact, I couldn't seem to find my model listed on there!?

Mine is a WDBAAA5000ABK. Labelled as a "WD My Passport Essential Ultra-portable Hard Drive 500GB" on the box. Could the 'Ultra' be a newer model than those listed on the site, possibly lower power?

I bought it in the UK from eBuyer: http://www.ebuyer.com/product/171896

Hmmm, I had had a quick look around for details such as that, but obviously not as thoroughly as yourself!

I think maybe the figure of 1000mA may refer to the max output of an optional AC adapter that comes with some models and not actually the expected consumption of these drives, but can't be sure. The model I have doesn't even have the option of being connected to an AC adapter, or even to a 'double' USB lead as some models do, so it would seem daft if this drive would ever need much more than 500mA.

If you find any further info on this, I'd love to hear it. When I have some spare time, maybe tonight, I'll do some more intensive tests with continuous reading and writing to the drive and let you know how it went.

Yes, I can confirm the Western Digital My Passport Essential 500GB drive works with the Sheevaplug, being powered soley from the Sheeva's USB port.

I havn't done much with it yet but will do more over next few days. So far I've just plugged it in, mounted it, and read files from it.

One thing to note with these WD drives, is that they come with a virtual CD drive setup, so that once plugged in, special WD encryption drivers and utilities are made available to any Windows PC that needs them. I downloaded a tool from their site to disable this.

Thanks! I hadn't noticed the theme changer before. Problem solved.

Not anything to do with the Sheeva plug, but to do with these forums...

Links within posts don't stand out very well from normal (non-link) text. On a couple of different monitors I use here, I often miss links on first glance and it's only when I hover over the link text that the links become obvious.

Would it be possible for a forum admin to look at this and if not too much bother, adjust the link CSS to make links more obvious? Underlined, or a more contrasting colour would be great.

That's good, but I still can't shake this feeling of impending doom! I've had a few SD cards fail on me in the past (usually in cameras) so maybe I've been burnt more than others. I'll have to ask you again in a few months time and maybe that will be persuade me to cross over.

At the moment, I figure the USB hard drive on my setup will be spinning majority of the day, if not 24/7, so it may as well host the OS along with everything else.


Thanks. I've actually just ordered a Western Digital My Passport Essential 500GB! Will let you guys know how I get on with it. Probably best if we add results of all these hard drives in the external hard drive section of the Plug Computer WIKI.

That would be nice, bit more than I was hoping to spend though

Just going to do some research on external USB drive power consumptions, find a good model to buy.

Will let you know how I get on!

Ahhh, I just read that the SheevaPlug can not provide the Seagate FreeAgent series of hard drives with enough power so an external PSU must also be used. From the SheevaPlug WIKI: http://www.plugcomputer.org/plugwiki/index.php/Frequently_Asked_Questions#Can_I_Use_a_Seagate_USB_FreeAgent_Go_250_GB_or_Similar_Large_USB_Drive.3F

So, won't be buying that drive...

Thanks for the advice Damon. Great link too, will be reading that properly in a few mins.

I'm just about to order a Seagate FreeAgent Go 500GB (http://www.ebuyer.com/product/149451) which will do me nicely for storage and I think I have some SD cards around here I'll play with too.

Cheers!

Thanks for the very useful information!

With regard to using the 8GB SD for root filesystem, have you had any issues at all? I was initially planning on doing that but was worried about excessive writes to the SD card causing it to fail prematurely. It would be nice if I could let the USB drive spindown overnight or whilst I'm away.