On 2008-02-16, Mike Chambers <mike@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > These external HD's that are out there, like a seagate 250G I saw at > Staples, can they work just fine with Fedora 8 and up? Sure. > Can I just plug that in and start putting files on it? > > Does it have to be reformatted and/or what type filesystem usually comes > on them (fat)? Most of the packaged external hard drives come with an NTFS filesystem pre-installed. Although Fedora8 can read/write NTFS filesystems using the ntfs3g package, it is less than ideal for linux files since NTFS doesn't support linux permissions, ACLs and such like. This isn't too big a problem since you can easily reformat to a supported filesystem like ext3. > How does Fedora recognize them and what path are they usually? And how > fast/slow are they compared to an internal hd? Fedora8 will auto-mount them under /media A USB device will be quite noticably slower than an internal device; whether this is an issue depends on what you intend to do with the device. > If I was to buy one, it mainly would connect (for now until I > trade/upgrade computers one day) to my little HP machine (acting as home > server) to host my data as I think one of my HD's are going bad, adn > this machine can't hold more than 40G (guessing due to BIOS) HD. > > In other words, do these things play nice with Fedora/linux and even > Windows if I wanted to take it with me to help fix another computer? If you want to use it with both linux and Windows, you might want to partition it into 2 partitions. One (ext3 perhaps) for your linux files, and the other (NTFS or FAT) for Windows files or files you wish to share between linux and Windows. BTW, it is often considerably less expensive to buy a USB drive enclosure and separate HD and assemble it yourself. All you will miss is the Windows-specific stuff bundled with the pre-assembled drive: NTFS filesystem, Windows drivers, other Windows software/crapware. -- John (john@xxxxxxxxxxx)
