I am contemplating buying one of the Seagate OneTouch Hub external hard drives as a backup for my media that’s currently stored on some other external hard drives connected to my home server since they are always spinning.

My local retailers don’t give me many options as far as large storage storage solution goes, and the only other viable option now is a WD My BOOK 14 TB.

However, the retailer I will be buying it from goes out of its way to state that Windows or macOS is required. Is there any reason I should believe that I will run into troubles under Linux? I’ve had no issues whatsoever with some other Seagate hard drives (Expansion 5 TB), which I just instantly reformat to ext4 and use as normal. My guess is that this is just for the included software? I just want to make sure before I order.

(More long term I will set up a NAS, but for now time to learn and configure is more scarce than money, so I just want a solution that will prevent me from losing my data)

EDIT: For anyone coming to this later wondering the same thing, I can confirm that it works just fine. It is just the included backup software that is not compatible. I’ve formatted it to ext4 and currently using rsync to backup my media.

  • schizo@forum.uncomfortable.businessEnglish
    2·
    29 days ago

    Maybe?

    It depends on if the added functions are software-based, or if there’s some hardware funkery going on.

    Given it’s a consumer product, I’d wager it’s just a drive in an enclosure that does all their mirroring/backups/encryption stuff in software, but their marketing material doesn’t seem to say one way or the other.

    Google indicates older versions can be reformatted, so I’d bet that’s still true.

    If I’m wrong it’s not my fault, etc.