Purchased 3 TB Seagate USB 3.0 drive from Amazon (http://amzn.to/TpduBU)

Waited… Very excited to connect to my ix2….

A few days later my 3 TB USB expansion drive arrived.  I hurried to unpack and connect to my ix2 expecting plug-and-play.  I plugged by no play.

An overwhelming feeling of sadness consumed me, followed by WTF then the joy of knowing I could and would hack this to make it work.

Knowing that this Iomega thing had to be running Linux I began to scour web for how to enable SSH with Firmware Version 3.3.2.29823

Found plenty of how to information on Firmware Version 2.x but 3.x (Cloud Enabled Firmware) is a bit more sparse.

Finally to enable SSH:  http://ip/diagnostics.html

SSH now enabled, opened PuTTY and SSH to device.

Username:  root
Password:  soho

Boom!  In….

A quick “df -h” shows my currently configured capacity:

A quick “cat /proc/scsi/usb-storage/4” followed by a “fdisk -l” reveals the drive is being seen by the ix2.

Created partition on /dev/sdc, “fdisk /dev/sdc”

Now what?

Hmmmmm…. Maybe I can create a mount point on /mnt/pools/B/B0, seems logical.

Whoops forgot to mkfs.

Run “mkfs /dev/sdc1”

“mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt/pools/B/B0/”

Hmmmm…..

“umount /dev/sdc1”

Tried to partition with parted (core dumps, ix2 running ver 1.8.  pretty sure GPT partition support not ready for primetime in vet 1.8)

Let see if I can get a new version of parted.

Enabled apt-get (required a little work)

cd /mnt/pools/A/A0
mkdir .system
cd .system

mkdir ./var; mkdir ./var/lib/; mkdir ./var/cache; mkdir ./var/lib/apt; mkdir ./var/cache/apt;  mkdir ./var/lib/apt/lists; mkdir ./var/lib/apt/lists/partial; mkdir ./var/cache/apt/archives;  mkdir ./var/cache/apt/archives/partial; mkdir ./var/lib/aptitude

(I think that is all the required dirs, you will know soon enough)

cd /var/lib
ln -s /mnt/pools/A/A0/.system/var/lib/apt/ apt
ln -s /mnt/pools/A/A0/.system/var/lib/aptitude/ aptitude
cd /var/cache
ln -s /mnt/pools/A/A0/.system/var/cache/apt/ apt

run “apt-get update”

Should run without issue.

run “aptitude update”
Note:  Should run without issue.

Jettison that idea, not enough space on root and /mnt/apps to install new version of parted and required dependencies.

New approach:

run “dd /dev/zero /dev/sdc”

Let run for a minute of so to clear all partition info (ctrl-c) to stop

Download EASEUS Partition Master 9.2.1 from filehippo (http://www.filehippo.com/download_easeus_partition_master_home/)

Install EASEUS Partion Master 9.2.1 on Windows 7 desktop
Connect 3 TB Seagate USB drive to Windows 7 desktop
Partition and format partition ext3 using EASEUS Partion Master 9.2.1
Note:  This takes a little while.

Once complete I connected the drive to my Iomega ix2

Voila!

Cleaned up the “/mnt/pools/B directory” I created earlier (“rm -rf /mnt/pools/B”)

Reboot my ix2 (make sure I didn’t jack anything up) and enjoy my added capacity.

Pretty sick footprint for ~ 4.5 TB of storage (1.8 TB of it R1 protected).