From: J G Miller on
On Sun, 03 Jan 2010 22:16:20 -0500, Hactar wrote:

> I borrowed one from my friend (no idea what it is on the inside,

Monitor the output of dmesg immediately after connecting it with
the USB cable and you should see some identifier for the disk.

For example,

[ 8.796141] usb-storage: device scan complete
[ 8.804434] scsi 6:0:0:0: Direct-Access WD 10EAVS External
1.75 PQ: 0 ANSI: 4
[ 8.897221] sd 6:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg5 type 0

In the above WD indicates Western Digital and a web search on 10EAVS
reveals further details about the model.