I finally received my new external hard drive:

As I was getting short on space on my internal drive (83GB dedicated to /home), I ordered a Lacie Porsche 320GB USB2.0 hard drive on Pixmania (the lowest price I found on the web). I received it some days later.

Although Linux is not supported according to the requirements, it worked like a charm once connected to an USB slot. Lacie drives are per default formatted in FAT, which is nice if you want to share your disk between window$ and Linux/Mac/*nix.

But I rapidly reformatted it like that:

# fdisk /dev/sdc
...
(p to print the partition table)
...
     Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/lacie1               1       37082   297861133+  83  Linux
/dev/lacie2           37083       38913    14707507+  83  Linux

One big partition (~300GB) formatted in ext3 journaled system, and a small one (~15GB) which I still have to format in FAT.

Here are some advantages of that way of formatting if you are using Linux:

• ext3 allows you to store files bigger than 4GB (DVD iso image, …), where FAT doesn’t.
• ext3 is not subject to fragmentation. FAT is!
• I mainly use this disk under Linux, to store backups, etc. Ext3 allows me to keep file permissions as on my system. FAT doesn’t…
• FAT is a window$ format… And as you know, window$ sucks!

However, I have kept some room for a FAT partition in order to transfer big files from windows to Linux and vice versa (some friends and family are still using windows).

The next thing I had to do was to configure udev to automatically populate /dev with lacie1 and lacie2 (corresponding to the two partitions), instead of the defaults sd*. That way, I can always access my drive with the same path, whatever the devices already connected (USB keys, camera, …). To do that, I created a new /etc/udev/rules.d/20-lacie.rules file:

The idVendor and idProduct data can be found using lsusb. Adding the appropriate rule in /etc/fstab is the final step:

/dev/lacie1     /mnt/lacie     ext3     auto,user     0 0