any suggestions on the best Portable External HardDrive?

[paranich]

I use Mint on all my home computers, but I know I'll need to transfer photos to Window's based machines also. I was looking for some inexpensive options, like Hammer or Buffalo? Just wondering what kind of experiences people have had?

[DrHu]

I think it might come down to the brand of hard drive you like, as the interfaces in an external case, will be mostly similar

• USB
  IEE3944 (firewire)
  iscsi
  ethernet

--or some combination

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_1394_interface
Since I like Seagate hard drives, I would probably suggest Freeagent, as an external usb drive
--ieee3944 (firewire) will be one of the quickest interface connections, usb might be the most convenient and ethernet would likely be the quickest and may fit into a network the easiest..

Apart from new media servers(computers from HP and others..) or NAS (Network Attached Storage), like Buffalo station etc, there is also the option of a very cheap PC with an network card + some hard drives and Freenas
http://www.freenas.org/
--a Pentium would work, find it in a junk stack, as the only thing that matters is having a network connection and enough space for a small OS setup/partition..

[paranich]

I also had lots of luck with Seagate, and WD, but I'm new to Linux and was curious if there one was better than the other. I didn't think it would matter, just asking around. As for the FreeNas, thanks for the tip, that's another of my side projects, I used to dabble with programing but that was a lifetime ago, I've just jumped head first into the Linux world as a hobby and looking to learn. I'm running 3 PCs from 10 years old to 2 years old all Mint in the house and have an old 450mz pentium I was thinking of building into a server just to see what I could make it do.

Thanks for the info.

[bobpur]

I have a Maxtor One Touch 120 gb and a Seagate Free Agent 160 gb. Both are 7200 rpm drives and I can burn ISO's directly from them without problems. With a slower drive you have buffer problems and higher coaster production unless you move ISO to the computer doing the burning. Both of these drives are formatted NTFS and do not mind whether they are on a Windows machine or a Linux machine