USB external disk works ok with linux?

Question

I'm about to buy a samsung USB G2 5ooGB, or a western digital 500GB USB Essential

In their specs, none of them say they work on linux. I'm almost sure they do work fine, just like my 4 GB pen drive

But I'd like to be sure before buying any of them.

By working fine I mean being able to format, read, and write them just like I do with my 4GB pen drive (I format them usgin palimpsest, and mount, read, and write to them just like with any other drive, without requiring any custom software and / or driver and / or compiling my own kernel or anything like that)

Answer 1

i use multiple seagate and wd external usb drives for rotated offsite backups without any problems (on standard debian kernels). depending on your needs you might want to format that drive with filesystem other than fat32/ntfs.

disks are seen by os as another scsi devices - like your pendrive - so they show up in /dev/sdx.

Answer 2

"USB Mass Storage" is pretty much a standard these days, so external storage is pretty much a given. What is not a given is any sort of interface to extras like a "backup button" on the device. These may use proprietary extensions to the standard, but regardless they should not interfere with the core functionality.