Seagate FreeAgent Desktop ST310005FDA2E1-RK 1 TB Hard Drive, 3.5" External

Seven external HDs under my belt over the last decade. Chose this for their reputation, warranty, comments online, my past experience. Efficient installation on XP Pro and Vista Ultimate machines, quiet, runs warm but not hot even with stand. Nice that is stackable when horizontal. Have used for two months without a problem. I think I will get a couple more to swap regularly for safety/security of data. Not as svelte as the ToGos, but the price point is hard to beat.

Here's how to use the FreeAgent Desk USB drive with the Linux operating system: . Note: this procedure makes the drive unusable with MS-Windows and deletes the Seagate Windows software on it. . Using cfdisk, remove the only (NTFS) partition and make a new one. Then put an ext3 filesystem on it: . mkfs.ext3 -i 300000 -m 1 -j -v /dev/sdx1 . where sdx is the device name the system puts the USB drive on (/dev/sdb, /dev/sdc, whatever). I use 300K bytes/inode because most of my space is taken by large multi-megabyte files. . To use the disk, mount its partition on, e.g., /mnt. . I use the mc (Midnight Commander) program to back up all of my files, but for an incremental backup you'll want a specialized backup program. . It takes 5-6 hours for 500GB of files, and the drive stays cool, on its stand in a vertical position (at least if the room temperature is 70 degrees F.). There's no activity light, but when the drive is seeking you can feel a faint vibration in it if you put your hand on it. . BE SURE TO UNMOUNT THE DRIVE explicitly with the umount command before disconnecting the USB cable, unplugging the drive's power, turning off the computer, etc. Otherwise the files on the drive may be lost.