====== External Hard Drives ====== It is always best to use the internal storage of the Astronomy Cluster, however, sometimes users like to use external hard drives. If you are going to attach a external hard drive to your desktop - please make sure that it is formatted corrected for a Linux environment (usually it should be formatted as ext3 for Linux). NTFS or FAT32 formatted hard drives might cause issues. In order to mount the disk - 1) plug in the external hard drive. 2) figure out what the desktop is seeing the disk as - *should* be /dev/sdb, but check! (you can check with the commands df or lsblk) 3) use the mount command: mount /dev/sdb /mnt1 (where /mnt1 is a mount point - you can create and mount anywhere, but best to just keep with the mount points) Then you can cd to the new mounted location and see your data! ====== A note about journaled external drives (Mac) ====== There are several Mac and OSX users in the department. As such it is common that some people may have a Mac external hard-drive. These are usually formatted as hfsplus and are usually "journaled". A drive that is "journaled" keeps a change log. Usually these are **NOT** compatible with Linux or MS environments as its the Mac OSX which is tracking changes to this external drive. We are able to mount these drives on the cluster, **HOWEVER,** these drives will be automatically mounted as read-only. Root (accessible **only** by the Sys Admins) is able to force these drive to mount as read-write. **HOWEVER,** this comes with a non-zero risk of data loss. Since the drive is keeping a change-log via Mac OSX, if a different OS makes changes to it, there is a possibility that the change-log / data will be corrupted. Use of this type of file formatted drive on the cluster is highly discouraged. "Journaled" hard-drives are not unique to Mac OSX environments, and its possible that external hard-drives in Windows / Linux environments might also be "journaled", but are less common. Sometimes it is possible to turn off this "journal" feature.