# Best system for mounting USB hard disk? - SOLVED

## dan_aka_jack

Dear Gentoo bods,

I need to mount my Archos AV420 on my Gentoo box.  The Archos looks just like a USB hard drive.

I'm pretty new to Gentoo so I've spent some time reading various articles on the Internet about mounting.  But I'm confused!  Please help.

My simple question is: what is the best system to use for mounting a hot-pluggable USB disk?  I don't mind manually typing the mount command every time I have to mount it.  But I do need the device to appear in /dev without needing to boot the system while the USB device is plugged in (i.e. it must be hot-pluggable).

Should I be using hotplug and udev?  I understand that supermount is not recommended any more.  But I've also read that udev isn't really meant for automounting USB devices.

Any pointers to up-to-date information would be much appreciated.

I'm using gentoo-dev-sources-2.6.9-r9

Thanks a lot,

JackLast edited by dan_aka_jack on Thu Feb 10, 2005 12:34 pm; edited 1 time in total

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## Tuna

udev is responsible that the device node /dev/sda will be assigned to your plugged in harddisk. devfs should do the same. if you dont care abouzt automatic mounting you can start right away to mount /dev/sda1 or similar to your mount point. if your want to go deper you might want to install submount to get your device automatically mounted. i use a usb stick and usb hd nicely with udev and submount.

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## dan_aka_jack

Hi,

Thanks a lot for your reply, Tuna.

Unfortunately, I can't get my USB device to appear in /dev at all.  I've enabled lots of stuff in the kernel.  I've enabled:

```

CONFIG_USB=y

CONFIG_USB_DEVICEFS=y

CONFIG_USB_${YOUR_HCI}=y

CONFIG_USB_STORAGE=y

some scsi support

CONFIG_SCSI=y

CONFIG_BLK_DEV_SD=y

some fat16/32 filesystems support

CONFIG_FAT_FS=y

CONFIG_MSDOS_FS=y

CONFIG_VFAT_FS=y
```

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## dsd

examine the end of "dmesg" after you plug it in

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## dan_aka_jack

Ah, fantastic - thanks a lot.  Looking at dmesg reveals I was looking in the wrong /dev directory.  My device appears as /dev/uba1.  Thanks for the help!  Brilliant.

Thanks guys,

Jack.

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## dan_aka_jack

Urg... ok... next problem.  The transfers are dirt slow.  Transfering from my Archos (which is a USB 2.0 device) runs at only 1Mbyte/sec.  Any thoughts?

Thanks a lot,

Jakc

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## Tuna

one 1mb/s sounds like usb 1.1? maybe you plugged it in the usb1.1 controller and not the usb2.0. the dmesg output should give some more hints like 'fast usb device' etc. or maybe the wrong drivers are loaded?

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## dan_aka_jack

Hi.  Yes, dmesg says "new high speed USB device using address 4". But if I go to KDE's system information utility and click on "usb", the Archos is listed as USB2.0 with a datarate of 480Mbps.

I'm using a standard Intel motherboard (i875) and I'm pretty sure the drivers are loaded correctly.  I'll check to see what sort of speeds I can get in Windows XP on the same hardware.  Perhaps I've screwed up one of the BIOS settings.

Thanks,

Jack

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## bbe

@dan_aka_jack

Did you ever solve this? I'm having the same problem with a Gmini 400, everything says USB2.0, and 480MB/s but transfers are dirt slow.

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## dsd

UB is the "low performance" driver

http://dev.gentoo.org/~dsd/gentoo-dev-sources/issues-current.htm#2.6.9-ub

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## dan_aka_jack

Sorry - I should have posted when someone fixed the problem for me.  As dsd says, UB is the low performace driver and is not to be used.

Thanks,

Jack

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