External drive for Synology NAS

[KenLane]

My Synology NAS is basically a Linux box. It stores up to 700 GB but I am using less than 10% of that.

You can attach an external USB drive to the Synology to back it up. It would want to format it with a Linux file system (not sure whether ext2 or ext3). So what I am looking for is an external drive that can be formatted in this way and does not need to be attached to Windows.

I am not sure that I want to power it by USB as I do not want to stress the Synology box so an independent power supply would be good.

The external drive does not need to be very portable and could be based on a hard drive enclosure.

Any suggestions from what Novatech have to offer?

It would be good to know whether anybody here has done this. Posting was stimulated by another thread here by a person who had not backed up his Synology - I started to feel guilty.

Ken

[mrgoose]

Forgive me if I'm grabbing hold of the wrong end of the stick here, Ken, but as far as I am aware, pretty well any external drive can be EXT2|3|4 formatted. Apart from a few small memory sticks, all my external drives are EXT3 and the big ones are also truecrypted. They all work perfectly.

Also, 3.5" form factor HD cases usually ship with a 12v switch-mode power supply - thus your USB supply is not used at all. WRT avoiding Windows, the standard GParted tool that ships with 'Bunty does everything you need.

Best wishes, G.

[KenLane]

Thanks for the quick reply. As an example of what was confusing me, Novatech 1TB 16MB USB2.0 External Hard Drive - Retail (NOV-E1TW ) has:

Software IncludedDrivers & Utilities, Lacie Backup Software OS RequiredApple MacOS X 10.3 or later, Microsoft Windows Vista / 2000 / XP System Requirements DetailsMacOS X 10.3 or later - PowerPC G3 - RAM 128 MB Windows 2000/XP/Vista - Pentium II - 350 MHz - RAM 128 MB
I am assuming from your reply that the failure to mention Linux is more to do with the Lacie Backup Software rather than the device.

Ken

[mrgoose]

Well I have EXT3 formatted Lacie products successfully. So I guess it is the backup software that requires Mac or Windows. LaCie usually stuffs cheap HD's inside pretty looking cases, c/w some hardware "RAID 0" lash-up in the case of its "Biggest Disks".

Unsurprisingly, all five of the Lacie 1TB & 2TB so-called "Biggest Disks" we purchased have all failed - all just outside warranty. None was purchased from Novatech I hasten to add!

Personally, I prefer to choose my own hard disk and case. In the 1TB range, the basic Samsung HD takes a lot of beating and the Newlink style cases are pretty good. IMHO.

WRT software: even back in the days when I used Windows, I seldom used bundled backup softs. Now I'm running all GNU/Linux on my systems, I have yet to encounter any Windows or Mac backup software that even comes close to rsync, both in terms of versatilty and performance.

Best wishes, G.