Removable drives

Luke Dean LukeD at pobox.com
Wed Mar 29 01:23:19 UTC 2006



On Tue, 28 Mar 2006, Christopher Sean Hilton wrote:

> I have a question to the community about removable drives, pendrives
> and usb and firewire attached hard drives. I'm just wondering how
> people are dealing with them in FreeBSD. I don't have any operational
> problems with them. I'm just wondering if I'm doing things the hard
> way.
>
> First Question: Which filesystem are people using on usb flash drives
> and removable hard drives? I'm using a mixture of ufs2, ext2, and
> msdos. I'm using ufs2 because I'm also using cfs to encrypt the
> contents and although I haven't tested this, I'm fairly certain cfs
> want's semantics that aren't in the msdos filesystem.

I use msdosfs because I use my portable devices with MS Windows systems 
and digital cameras frequently, and I need compatibility more than 
anything else.

> Second Question: Are most people using vfs_usermount=1? I'm using the
> automounter. It's a little bit more work to setup but I'm using a
> laptop and since I've started to use the automounter the number of
> times that I've had to fsck my removable drive because I've suspended
> my laptop with a pendrive still attached and mounted has been reduced
> incredibly.

I define the device to /etc/fstab with the "noauto" option, then
explicitly mount and unmount the device as necessary.  If I happen to need 
to mounst  more than one of these devices at a time, I study the 
device numbers and read man pages until I remember how to
mount something by its device name.

So no, you're not doing things the hard way.  :)


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