User-Supplied Hard Drive Requirments

  • An external hard drive with only USB 2.0 and/or Firewire is preferred.
    • An external hard drive equipped with an ethernet port intended for NAS (Network Attached Storage) is unacceptable even if it has included USB or Firewire ports. These ports on a NAS drive do not allow direct-to-pc connectivity.
  • We can accomodate your needs to use an internal SATA or IDE hard drives, but they are not preferred.
  • Not responsible for bad or damaged hard drives.
  • Please specify which file system you would like: FAT32, NTFS or EXT3
    • NTFS: readable/writable by Linux & Windows, readable by mac
    • FAT32: R/W Windows, R/W Linux
    • EXT3: R/W Linux
  • We are required to format all hard drives on a stand-alone system before connecting them to our networked machines. Please contact us if this presents any complications for you.
  • Useable capacity of hard drives - Please be aware, the useable capacity of commercial hard drives is not as advertised. For example, a 1 terabyte drive does not have 1 terabyte (1000 gigabytes) of useable storage after it is formatted. Please don't hesitate to contact us with questions.
  • Once a data request is received by SDMS, an email will be sent with a PoC, mailing address and your data request number. The data request number should be included in all further email, paperwork and shipments.