Soon I will be needing a external hard-drive, mainly for college. I will hopefully have an laptop with Ubuntu on by then, but I also wanna use school/home(this) computers using Vista/Xp. And passwords, but not on the whole drive.

Any product links or brands I should look out for?

Also, is Ubuntu, Java and Openoffice enough for college? I'll probably get wine, and loads of beer

This post has been edited by toby: Jun 21 2007, 09:12 PM

Seagate drives are normally very trusted, so any external enclosure with a Seagate in it should be fine. I personally Use LaCie, which comes with a seagate inside and the casing is very tough metal, to prevent damage when caring it around. They normally come formatted for a Mac, but you can format it for whatever you use. I have mine formatted to FAT32 so I can easily go between multiple operating systems. Windows, Linux and OSX can all read and right to the same partition.

I am not sure if I completely understand what you are saying. Are you saying that you want part of the drive (a partition) to be password protected and the other part unprotected?

The Ubuntu distributions are quite complete for general use, but whether it is enough for you to use in college would depend on what you will be studying. It has all you need to write papers and manage email and access the internet, etc. OpenOffice is a great suite of programs. Some of the artwork for the presentation template are cheesy, but you could always make your own. I never used Linux for school purposes much because I needed to be using industry standard software, which was not available on Linux.

I'd put a FAT32, but there is that really annoying 2GB per file limit that I hate. 2GB isn't enough for a lot of my files anymore.

xboxrulz

I'm also a Seagate (and Maxtor) hard drive user. I highly recommend using any of those two models.

Depending on what you will be using the laptop for, there may be other programs you might need to be installed. For the Windows part, I recommend sticking with Windows XP for now. Let the Vista issues sort out after a year or so and then upgrade to it

At the least, I would do a dual boot, so I can use Ubuntu for speed.

The external hard drive, I meant something that can have passworded folders, and still work on both Os's.

I have a LaCie external (with Seagate hard drive) formatted at FAT32 for Windows, SUSE and OS X. It works well - and most of the files I have are under the 2GB limit, so I'm OK.

The Seagate brand is a good one, and reliable - I havent had any problems with my drives (the external one, and my internal hard drive is a seagate too!) Never had any problems before!

Good Luck
-jimmy