Ah, Best Buy, You Are My Comedy Central

[elfs]

I went to Best Buy to price some backup storage, since there are those new ~500MB USB-only drives out there. The guy who decided that a backup drive should be the exact same size and shape as a Moleskin deserves a freakin' Clio for that kind a brilliance.

As I was looking at the selection, a blue-shirted salesdude, older than the average, leaned over said, "Do you need any help?"

I picked up the model I was looking at, a Seagate, and said, "What does this work with?"

"That works with everything." He smiled as if there were a joke hidden somewhere in his reply.

"So, does it work with Ubuntu?"

He said, "Is that for Windows or Mac?"

I sighed. "It's neither. It's an operating system."

"Oh. I don't know."

At least he didn't say, "I doubt it" or something. I put the drive back.

Comments

[ewhac.livejournal.com]

I am not aware of any USB mass storage units that don't work with a recent vintage Linux. A new device node automatically appears in /dev upon insertion and, depending on who's talking to HAL (*cough*GNOME*cough*), may even be automatically mounted for you.

They all come pre-partitioned and pre-formatted with FAT32 or NTFS, of course, but that's easily fixed.

[(Anonymous)]

'eh, newer LaCie drives come with 2 small partitions, which autorun setups in Windows and OSX, to format it for you. But a simple Repart fixes that too.

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

Why not just leave it NTFS so it can then be used to also move stuff to friends who have Windows?

[ewhac.livejournal.com]

Because Linux support for NTFS is incomplete, and always will be, as Microsoft refuses to document the filesystem structure. Although recent Linux NTFS modules claim read/write capability, you can only write in limited fashion to existing files. In practical terms, NTFS should be considered read-only to Linux.

If you want read and write files on a mass storage device on both Linux and Windows, FAT32 is still the only real option. (There is an ext2 filesystem driver for Windows, but I don't know how reliable it is, and Windows' access controls don't really map well to anything else.)