New 1TB USB3 hard drive

I bought one of these, for A$79:
http://www.officeworks.com.au/retail/products/Technology/Data-Storage/External-Hard-Drives/Portable-Hard-Drives/TB110AK3BA



My laptop hard drive is "bursting at the seams", and it has one USB3 socket, so when I saw this little drive advertised, I went for it. Nice and small, and is powered off the USB cable.

I partitioned it into lots of partitions, for the purpose of doing many test installs of Quirky, and one large partition for general file storage and working area.

Now, a curious thing. I chose ext4 for most of the partitions, however, when I clicked on any of them (desktop icons) and mounted them, the drive activity-light started to flash, and would not stop flashing.
That is definitely not behaviour that I want. I like an activity-light, it is confirmation that files are being read-from of written-to the drive. But, if it blinks all the time, it defeats the purpose.

But, when I changed the partitions to ext3, all was well, the activity-light did not keep flashing!

So, I used GParted to change all of the partitions to ext3.

This is interesting. Why is ext4 triggering that activity-light continuously?

Tags: general