17. Removable drives

All SCSI drives should work if the controller is supported, including optical (MO), WORM, floptical, Bernoulli, Zip, Jaz, SyQuest, PD, and others.

• Panasonic MO (combines a CD-ROM drive and an optical removable disk). You have to set a switch when configuring the kernel to get both part work at the same time.
• Parallel port Zip drives
  ftp://gear.torque.net/pub/
• Parallel port Avatar Shark-250
  http://www.torque.net/shark.html

Removable drives work like hard disks and floppies, just fdisk/mkfs and mount the disks. Linux provides drive locking if your drives support it. mtools can also be used if the disks are in MS-DOS format.

CD-R drives require special software to work. Read the CD-R Mini-HOWTO.

Linux supports both 512 and 1024 bytes/sector disks. Starting with kernel 2.1.32 Linux also supports 2048 bytes/sector. A patch to kernel 2.0.30 is available at http://liniere.gen.u-tokyo.ac.jp/2048.html.

The 2048 bytes/sector support is needed for

• Fujitsu magneto-optical disk drives M2513

Starting with pre-patch-2.0.31-3 IDE/ATAPI internal Zip drives, flopticals and PD's are supported.

• LS-120 floptical
• PD-CD