Hi,

I just bought this external USB harddrive case where i putted a new HD of 120 GB in. I connect it with my pc and started.
First i started in windows trying to get the device to work. Well basically i could forget it, it saw a usb masstorage device, but i couldn't format my HD, i couldn't do anything i didn't even see it in "my computer". So after 20 minutes of trying, i switched to linux, it booted, and it nicly asked, would you like to format your new harddisk. I said yes .... and i just love it now. 10 seconds work in linux ... don't we just love it ;-)

1 question, I formatted the HD totally as FAT32 is this okay, or doesn't fat 32 support 120Gb?

FAT32 is supposed to support about 2 terabytes. (Unfortunately never been able to test that. ) I assume you want it all shareable? Because, size or not, FAT32's not the best fs. But for sharing between Linux and Windows, I suppose it is. Cool you got your gear working.

Formatting FAT32 in Windows 2000 and Windows XP is limited to 32 gigabytes but they are ok when reading FAT32 partitions as big as 2 terabytes. You have to use a 3rd party format utility to format partitions bigger than 32 gigabytes using the FAT32 filesystem when you only have either Windows 2000 or Windows XP. If you have Windows 95 or Windows 98, you can format just about any size. Someone took the source code for mkdosfs and compiled it in Windows, so you can format very huge partitions as FAT32 in Windows 2000 or Windows XP.

I use FAT32 on my external drive too.

I had the same problem, Windows XP was not playing nice with the drive. I got it to work and format under windows but I did the formatting on another OS.

External drives are so neat and useful.

So what is the best filesystem? I know that there excists something like riser (used with suse) , and others (don't want to post the fdisk manual here).

I'm happy indeed that it works, but one question. Just coppied 10 GB on it and it is rather slow i think. approx 1MB/second is this fast for USB2.0 or slow?

I'm not an fs expert (or any kind of expert) but it varies for intended uses if you're micromeasuring high performance. Reiser's good (what I use) and XFS seems to be. NTFS (Microsoft) isn't bad as they go, but is a royal pain. So, like I say, if you want to share, FAT32 is the way to go - if you want Linux, I'd say Reiser or at least any of the other journalled systems - XFS, Ext3, etc.

Dunno about the USB, but that does sound slow. I seem to get 17MB/S at a rough approximation.