USB Mass Storage Devices

This feature description has been revised in the Solaris 9 4/04 release. These features are now available for x86 and SPARC platforms.

All USB storage devices are now accessed as removable media devices through volume management. This change has the following advantages:

• USB storage devices with standard MS-DOS or Windows (FAT) file systems are now supported.

• You can use the user-friendly rmformat command instead of the format command to format and partition all USB storage devices. If you need the functionality of the format command, use the format -e command.

• You can use the fdisk command if you need to do fdisk-style partitioning.

• Nonroot users can now access USB storage devices, because the root-privileged mount command is no longer needed. The device is automatically mounted by vold and is available under the /rmdisk directory. If a new device is connected while the system is down, do a reconfiguration boot with the boot -r command so that vold recognizes the device. Note that vold does not automatically recognize a hot-plugged device. If a new device is connected while the system is up, restart vold. For more information, refer to the vold(1M) and scsa2usb(7D) man pages.

• Disks with FAT file systems can be mounted and accessed. For example:

  mount -F pcfs /dev/dsk/c2t0d0s0:c /mnt

• All USB storage devices are now power managed, except for those devices that support LOG SENSE pages. Devices with LOG SENSE pages are usually SCSI drives that are connected through a USB-to-SCSI bridge device. In previous Solaris releases, some USB storage devices were not power managed because they were not recognized as removable media.

• Applications might work differently with USB mass storage devices. Note the following issues when using applications with USB storage devices:

  • Applications might make incorrect assumptions about the size of the media because only smaller devices such as diskettes and Zip drives were removable previously.

  • Requests by applications to eject media on devices where this removal would be inapplicable, such as a hard drive, succeed and do nothing.

  To revert to the behavior of previous Solaris releases that did not treat all USB mass storage as removable media devices, update the /kernel/drv/scsa2usb.conf file.

For more information about using USB mass storage devices, see the scsa2usb(7D) man page.

For information about troubleshooting USB mass storage device problems, see “What's New in USB Devices?” in System Administration Guide: Basic Administration.