Saturday, November 04, 2006

Maxtor Personal Storage 3200 320 GB external USB 2.0 drive to stage backups under Linux

Today I bought a Maxtor Personal Storage 3200 320 GB (Model U01H320) from Circuit City. 320G with 8M cache for merely $159. They matched their online price by taking $20 off the $179 in-store price. Amazon.com is selling the same item on behalf of CompUSA for $169.
The drive will be used to stage backups at our co-lo. At work, we've waited too long for a budget to come through for a real NAS or a tape library/magzine/autoloader. It is one of those day-to-day challenges of small businesses which face the same challenges with much more limited resources. The daily full backup set now amounts to 12G, all compressed by gzip, my favorite tool.

From a RHEL 4.4 AS (CentOS 4.4, to be more exact) guest inside VMWare, the drive was detected as USB 1.1 (full speed) instead of USB 2.0. I assume it is a limitation of the VMWare emulation.
usb 1-1: new full speed USB device using address 2
Initializing USB Mass Storage driver...

scsi1 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices

Vendor: Maxtor Model: 3200 Rev: 0341

Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 02
USB Mass Storage device found at 2
usbcore: registered new driver usb-storage
USB Mass Storage support registered.
SCSI device sda: 625142448 512-byte hdwr sectors (320073 MB) sda: assuming drive cache: write through
SCSI device sda: 625142448 512-byte hdwr sectors (320073 MB) sda: assuming drive cache: write through
sda: sda1
Attached scsi disk sda at scsi1, channel 0, id 0, lun 0

Pretty interesting to see it actually has NTFS as partition type. wonder how it would fly with MacOS out of the box?
Disk /dev/sda: 320.0 GB, 320072933376 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 1 38913 312568641 7 HPFS/NTFS
Since I am gonna use it under RHEL 4, I go ahead relabel the partition as 'Linux' and formatted it as EXT3.
/root# mke2fs -L E320G -O sparse_super,dir_index,filetype -T largefile4 -j /dev/sda1
mke2fs 1.35 (28-Feb-2004)
Filesystem label=E320G
OS type: Linux

Block size=4096 (log=2)
Fragment size=4096 (log=2)
76320 inodes, 78142160 blocks
3907108 blocks (5.00%) reserved for the super user

First data block=0

Maximum filesystem blocks=79691776 2385 block groups
32768 blocks per group, 32768 fragments per group
32 inodes per group
Superblock backups stored on blocks:

32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632, 2654208, 4096000, 7962624, 11239424, 20480000, 23887872, 71663616 Writing inode tables: done
Creating journal (8192 blocks): done Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done This filesystem will be automatically checked every 33 mounts or
180 days, whichever comes first. Use tune2fs -c or -i to override.

Ahh, I always forgot to reduce the percentage reserved for super user from the default 5% to 1%.
/dev/sda1 312538740 98368 296811940 1% /mnt
/root# tune2fs -m 1 /dev/sda1
tune2fs 1.35 (28-Feb-2004)
Setting reserved blocks percentage to 1 (781421 blocks)

/root# df -kv /mnt

Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 312538740 98368 309314688 1% /mnt

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