On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 01:42:59PM -0400, Michael Walma wrote: > > I am in the market for a largish ( >= 1T ) external drive which plays > nicely with linux. All usb drives should work. I have used several and reformatted many to ext3. I like the Vantec cases that take a standard SATA drive. > I am guessing it will be USB 2.0 but I wouldn't rule > out network attached storage if the price/performance were attractive. there is also eSATA if you have a free SATA port. Many drive enclosures include a SATA/eSATA bracket and cable. A dedicated small NAS box is nice, but expensive. You should be able to build a cheaper and more usefull (and powerfull) Linux server from off the shelf computer parts. > If it is USB, I would likely reformat ext3 or similar. I would be using > it a the core file server for my home network, including my media > library. I would caution against using USB as the main harddrive in a file server. In my experience USB does not fail well. For close to a year I used an old laptop with a large USB drive as a file server. Occationally the entire USB kernel subsystem would stop responding forcing a reboot. I don't recall losing any data, but it was annoying. I would use eSATA instead. -- sg