External harddrive via USB

[Les Mikesell]

Mike Chambers 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?
> 
> 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)?

They mostly come formatted as fat32 which will work across 
linux/windows/mac but will lose the owner/permission attributes so you 
probably only want to use that if you move the drive around - in which 
case you might like one of the little 2.5" portable versions that don't 
need external power.

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

At a low level they show up as the next available /dev/sdX 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.

A machine that old will likely only have USB1 which will be too slow to 
consider using for disk access.  However the drive size limit usually 
only affects booting.  Many old machines will accept larger drives even 
though bios will only see 32gigs, and if you put a small /boot partition 
as the first thing on the drive, Linux will boot and run fine. 
Unfortunately, some machines will lock up instead of booting - also new 
controllers/drives are much faster, so if you put a new drive in that 
box you would probably want to add a new controller card anyway.

> 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?

A fat-formatted portable USB drive is great for transporting files, but 
I'd recommend a bootable Knoppix CD as a better starting point for 
fixing things - especially if the machine doesn't have USB 2.0.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com