# My external hard disk doesn't like FreeBSD :-(



## christhegeek (Mar 10, 2021)

My external hard disk doesn't like FreeBSD :-(
I have so much trouble with my external disk
On my computer i have 1) NVME SSD high speed that works perfectly with FreeBSD  2) An old western digital hard disk i have since 2008  it works perfectly on FreeBSD no problems 
3) A Toshiba Sata SSD  works perfectly    and last
An external Toshiba hard disk (TOSHIBA MQ04UBF100 (JU002U))
Tried to format this disk as GPT as MBR ,  using ufs 
and everytime it has problems even when it gives me no errors if i do a fsck it shows errors etc
The disk is brand new and doesn't have any problems smart shows that it has no problems at all !
The only time it worked was when i formatted it with zfs filesystem.
I don't know what is happening with this disk  , i have plugged in a usb3 port i suspect this could be the cause of all these problems !!!


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## matt_k (Mar 10, 2021)

you did not paste any particular error message, what kind of problems does it have? What are we trying to achieve here? My crystal ball says, that maybe the USB port is not fulfilling the disk's voltage/current requirements.


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## ralphbsz (Mar 10, 2021)

christhegeek said:


> My external hard disk doesn't like FreeBSD :-(
> I have so much trouble with my external disk
> ...
> An external Toshiba hard disk (TOSHIBA MQ04UBF100 (JU002U))
> ...


What does "external" mean? How is the disk connected? The term "external" could range all the way from "normal SATA cable but not bolted down, sitting loose on top of the computer case" to "virtual disk on the other side of a planet using a hosting-service specific protocol that only Amazon/Google/Microsoft" know about.



> The disk is brand new and doesn't have any problems smart shows that it has no problems at all !


While SMART is undeniably useful, it does not have perfect predictive power. About 15 years ago, someone named Eduardo gave a very good talk about SMART and disk health at a research conference, and I like to summarize that talk this way: Half the time when a disk fails, SMART gives no warning of it. Half the time when SMART says that a disk will fail, it actually survives just fine. The reason SMART is still useful that it has the highest correlation of any (publicly available) disk predictive fault analysis.



> The only time it worked was when i formatted it with zfs filesystem.


That could be because ZFS is capable of diagnosing and correcting errors in many cases (RAID for example).



> i have plugged in a usb3 port i suspect this could be the cause of all these problems !!!


Not necessarily. Many disks work fine plugged in via USB-3. For example, for the last ~2 or 3 years, I have one external disk that's plugged in solely via USB-3 (doesn't even need a power cable), and it works great.

If you give us some details, like what works and what doesn't, and exact error messages, we might be able to help.


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## christhegeek (Mar 14, 2021)

matt_k said:


> you did not paste any particular error message, what kind of problems does it have? What are we trying to achieve here? My crystal ball says, that maybe the USB port is not fulfilling the disk's voltage/current requirements.


The disk is working fine with windows,linux,openbsd. Also i think it doesn't have any problems when i use zfs . The problems begins with ufs  tried mbr,gpt partition schemes none worked don't know what is wrong ... the error messages varies won't make sense the disk has been checked is in top condition as new


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## christhegeek (Mar 14, 2021)

I updated the bios and changed the bios photo to a more ... sexy freebsd one
and i don't have any problems anymore i think it was a setting on bios.
Now i have formatted my external drive using UFS seems perfect no errors anymore.
The only thing it gets on my nerve is that i didn't formatted with a label and dolphin shows a number


ralphbsz said:


> What does "external" mean? How is the disk connected? The term "external" could range all the way from "normal SATA cable but not bolted down, sitting loose on top of the computer case" to "virtual disk on the other side of a planet using a hosting-service specific protocol that only Amazon/Google/Microsoft" know about.
> 
> 
> While SMART is undeniably useful, it does not have perfect predictive power. About 15 years ago, someone named Eduardo gave a very good talk about SMART and disk health at a research conference, and I like to summarize that talk this way: Half the time when a disk fails, SMART gives no warning of it. Half the time when SMART says that a disk will fail, it actually survives just fine. The reason SMART is still useful that it has the highest correlation of any (publicly available) disk predictive fault analysis.
> ...


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## Phishfry (Mar 15, 2021)

christhegeek said:


> The only thing it gets on my nerve is that i didn't formatted with a label and dolphin shows a number


Well tunefs(8) allows you to add a label afterwords with the -l option flag.
You will need to manually edit /etc/fstab to suit your new label.
`tunefs` will only label an unmounted or read-only filesystem, so you need to boot into single-user mode.
Single user mode will need permissions changed after you run tunefs to set a label. fstab editing needs rw.
This is used to make disk RW for fstab editing: `mount -o rw /`



			Labeling Disk Devices


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