External harddrive via USB

[Mike Chambers]

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?

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)?

How does Fedora recognize them and what path are they usually?  And how
fast/slow are they compared to an internal hd?

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?

-- 
Mike Chambers
Madisonville, KY

"The best lil town on Earth!"