WD portable hard drive question

[Billy Crook]

I wouldn't buy a WD mybook, or any WD external drive for that matter,
at least for another few years.  They lost my trust when they started
doing the special-software-required crap.  It may be possible to get
their drives to work in gnu, but they chose to muddy the waters.  I
won't reward that with a sale.

I recently bought a 2TB external seagate from Microcenter for $109.  I
wouldn't waste my desk space on anything smaller than 2TB these days,
and its twice the deal this WD one is.  And I didn't wonder if it
would come with proprietary crapware required to make it work right.
I did however, ask the salesclerk if I could return it for a full
refund if it didn't work out of the box with gnu+linux.

udevadm monitor
(plugged in drive)
(saw device node)
ctrl-c
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdg bs=1M count=1
parted /dev/sdg mklabel gpt
parted /dev/sdg mkpart primary
mkfs.ext4 -j -O extents,dir_index,sparse_super /dev/sdg1
mkdir /mnt/usb
echo /dev/sdg1 /mnt/usb ext4 noatime 0 0 >> /etc/fstab
mount /mnt/usb

And I've been using for the last couple weeks without fail.

Or if you use a gui automounter, and are ok with whatever filesystem
comes on it, just plug it in and it will pop up.