Using USB Mass Storage Devices

For up-to-date information on using USB mass storage devices in this Solaris release, see USB Mass Storage Devices.

Starting in the Solaris 9 release, removable mass storage devices such as USB CD-RWs, hards disks, DVDs, digital cameras, Zip, Peerless, SmartMedia, CompactFlash, ORB, and USB diskette devices are supported.

For a complete list of USB devices that are supported in the Solaris environment, see http://www.sun.com/io_technologies/USB.html.

These devices can be managed with or without volume management. For information on managing devices with volume management, see vold(1M).

Using USB Diskette Devices

USB diskette devices appear as removable media devices like other USB devices. USB diskette devices are not managed by the fd (floppy) driver. Applications that issue ioctl(2) calls intended for the fd (native floppy) driver will fail. Applications that issue only read(2) and write(2) calls will succeed. Other applications, such as SunPCI and rmformat, will also succeed.

CDE's File Manager does not fully support USB diskettes at this time. However, you can open, rename, and format diskettes that contain a UFS file system from File Manager's Removable Media Manager. You can only open diskettes that contain a PCFS file system from the Removable Media Manager. If a diskette contains either type of file system, you can successfully drag and drop files between the diskette and File Manager.

Volume management (vold) sees the USB diskette device as a SCSI removable media device. Volume management makes the device available for access under the /rmdisk directory.

For more information on how to use USB diskette devices, see Chapter 1, Managing Removable Media (Overview).

Using Non-Compliant USB Mass Storage Devices

Some devices might be supported by the USB mass storage driver even though they do not identify themselves as compliant with the USB mass storage class or identify themselves incorrectly. The scsa2usb.conf file contains an attribute-override-list that lists the vendor ID, product ID, and revision for matching mass storage devices, as well as fields for overriding the default device attributes. The entries in this list are commented out by default, and can be copied and uncommented to enable support of particular devices.

If you connect a USB mass storage device to a system running this Solaris release and the system is unable to use it, you can check the /kernel/drv/scsa2usb.conf file to see if there is a matching, commented entry for this device. Follow the information given in the scsa2usb.conf file to see if a particular device can be supported by using the override information. For a listing of recommended USB mass storage devices, go to http://www.sun.com/io_technologies/USB.html.

For more information, see scsa2usb(7D).