Choosing a USB powered hard drive for the Sheeva

[monkeyhybrid]

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

[monkeyhybrid]

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.

[mhtsaras]

I also bought the Western Digital My Passport Essential  500 GB 2.5", WDBAAA5000ABK-EES, and all I can say is that it works smoothly with the plug.
I pushed it a little further and test it with the following running simultaneously for a couple of days:
samba
irssi (downloading two or more big files with dcc and chatting )
rtorrent (downloading and seeding about 7 big torrents)
watch from an ubuntu pc connected to the same lan with the plug an xvid movie streamed from the usb disk.
Another windows vista pc connected to the same lan was reading and writing files to the disk.
The disk worked fine without a glitch and the plug was showing 4-20% cpu load with average 6-12%.
It also goes to standby mode after some 5-10 minutes of inactivity, and the plug can wake it up easily in 1-2 seconds.
The most of the cpu load was under the ntfs-3g, the driver for linux to see ntfs drives.
Ntfs-3g is power hungry but the big disadvantage is that it reaches terrible speeds from other computers on the same lan:
download to usb disk 14 MB/sec
upload                        7  MB/sec

With another fat32 usbdisk connected to the plug, I had speeds ~ 23 MB/sec down. 16 MB/sec upload.
(with 2 windows pcs I have speeds ranging around 25-40 MB/sec, transfering files between them.)
I guess that formating the disk with ext3 or ext4 I will have better speeds.
What file system is recommended to format the usb disk of the plug to have better speeds considering that I boot from the SD card which is formated with ext2 ?'??

[monkeyhybrid]

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.

[MarkF]

What file system is recommended to format the usb disk of the plug to have better speeds considering that I boot from the SD card witch is formated with ext2

If Windows compatibility is not important (you don't need to unplug the drive and plug it into a Windows machine), I would suggest a native, journaled FS instead of a Windows FS.  ext3 has worked well for me; however, I use it on a UPSed plug running Network UPS Tools (NUT) to allow smooth shutdown when the server's UPS battery gets low.

With the drive doing out-of-order writes, removing power before the drive's HW cache is flushed completely can cause corrupted data for a filesystem.