Hi.


I'm in the market for buying an external harddrive to back up the files on my computer. Two candidates are these:

• LaCie 500GB P3 USB 2.0 Harddrive, 7200rpm, 11ms, 8MB cache
• Western Digital Passport II 160GB, USB2.0, Black

As far I as know most external harddrives are supported by linux (i.e. the drivers are already compiled with the kernel), and once connected to my linux box transferring the files can start. I'm new to external harddrives, so let me know if I'm way off.

How can I make sure that these harddrives (and others) indeed will work with my linux box?

I'm running Ubuntu Dapper Drake (planning to upgrade soon) with the 2.6 kernel.



Regard,
kenneho

Any USB drive should work really, personally I have two of the Lacie 500's they are nice quiet little drives pretty fast too I usually get a 30+ MB/sec transfer rate when using them. One thing you would probably want to do is delete the FAT32 partition that is on the device then recreate a linux partition and format it with your file system of choice otherwise the permissions/owners of the files you store on it will be lost.

Thanks for the quick reply.

That's what I thought - just plug it in and it works. I don't think I'll need to keep the permissions/owners of the files, as the files will mainly be MP3's and so forth. But thanks for the tip!

Personally I think the better way to go is just buy an external aluminum USB 2.0 enclosure for about 30 bucks, then add in whatever harddrive you want.

Those will definately work with modern linux.

I wouldn't imagine if you bought what you posted would be any sort of problem. They are basically the same thing, just pre-packaged.