I put my camera SD/HC card into my laptop (running Debian/testing) and it didn’t mount. Usually I would just run the mount command to get it going:

    dmesg | tail
    mount /dev/mmcblk0p1 /mnt

That unfortunately has some annoyances and I decided to solve this finally.

I’ve noticed my laptop disk filling up… particularly in $HOME/work/*. Lots of little contracts, each involving at least the linux kernel tree of one vintage of another, are to blame.

To solve this, I decided to pickup an external drive. I am using USB 2.0, because my laptop, Thinkpad x41, has no eSATA or even firewire. So I cannot compare the performance over another connection, but I can have a look at which filesystem (xfs or ext3) will perform my workloads best.