External USB Drives

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Wed, 2010-01-13 at 16:46 +0000, Jonathan Allen wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> I'd like to buy a 1.5Tb (or so) external USB disc drive to use for backup
> from my main file server.  Most of the ones I see around seem to say that
> they want Wondiws something - is that necessary or meaningful?  Should I
> just be able to plug it in and use it?  Do I need to partition and format
> it, or will it just work?

If you're happy with whatever filesystem it comes with (usually vfat or
NTFS) then it will just work. You can of course reformat if you wish.
Personally I put ext4 on my 500GB drive and it works like a charm.

If you have multiple machines you might also want to consider a small
NAS. I just got a 2TB Iomega ix2 unit for around $300 and am playing
with it as a backup server for several Linux/Windows/Mac machines. It
even says Linux on the box :-)

poc