lacie external hard drive supported?

[Bill Campbell]

On Sun, Sep 27, 2009, Dan Nelson wrote:
>In the last episode (Sep 26), Chris Whitehouse said:
>> Hi all
>> 
>> Does anyone have experience of a LaCie Hard Disk, Design by Neil Poulton
>> eSATA, FireWire 400 & Hi-Speed USB 2.0 1TB ?
>> 
>> http://www.lacie.com/uk/products/product.htm?pid=11064
>> 
>> Are all the interfaces supported? The data sheet says it is supported 
>> under Linux. Does that mean it is safe to assume it is under FreeBSD?
>
>In general, you can assume that any SATA/SAS/firewire/usb hard drive will be
>supported.  The only thing that might not be supported is RAID array
>management for the more expensive external units (you'll still be able to
>acess the data though).

The LaCie drives typically come with utilities to make them
painless to use in a Mac OS X environment, but these can be
removed easily of one doesn't want to use them on OS X.

We are using a 1TB LaCie quadra on Macs, and use the commercial
iPartition software which allows one to manipulate the boot
information to switch between PPC Mac and Intel as well as to
make a wide variety of partitions (even including Xenix if I
remember correctly :-).  I haven't tried these with FreeBSD, but
it appears that it would allow moving the drive between Macs and
FreeBSD machines.

I must say that I was impressed with the ability of iPartition
and the commercial Mac SuperDuper backup program which allowed me
to change the boot on the 1TB drive from booting on a PPC Mac to
boot on an Intel without losing any data, and to resize existing
partitions pretty painlessly as well.

I use the word partition above in the Linux sense, which are
generally referred to as slices in FreeBSD-land.

Bill
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