What portable external hard drive should I buy for my Linux?

Question

I need a portable external hard drive that works for both Windows and Linux without installing additional drivers. I want it to be plug-n-play. I am using Ubuntu dual-booted with Windows XP at home. Please provide me some brands/models and descriptions.

Answer 1

Actually storage devices rarely have any issue with linux. Any external drive you buy should work. A couple things to look out for though. Nearly all the devices come formated FAT32 out of the box, which will work find with Windows and Linux, though it doesn't copy advanced file permissions from either OS. If you format it NTFS, not all distro will automatically mount it, some you may have to manually use ntfs-3g from the command line to mount it.

Answer 2

as bakegoods said, they pretty much all work.  if you copy your linux files as .tar or .tgz archives, it'll keep the perms and ownerships and stuff on any fs, even fat32.  however fat32 has a 4GB file size limit, so you cant backup your whole hd to a .tgz on fat32, etc...