Seagate Technology 200 GB USB 2.0 and FireWire External Drive ( ST3200823A-RK )
Excellent external hard drive.
This external drive was purchased in order to provide backup storage for multiple machines with multiple operating systems.  Out of the box it was recognised by WinXP and installed after plugging the unit into the rear USB port of the computer.  The external hard drive also has firewire connectivity that will allow another unit of this type to be daisy chained to it via the firewire port if the firewire is not used to connect to a computer.   <br /> <br />Being aware that WinXP is somewhat vulnerable to virus software et al the decision was made to move the external backup drive to a Linux machine in order to provide added security for the backups.  As this drive arrives preconfigured for the Windows environment, this was not to be a plug and play move.  After a little configuration of the Linux software however, the external drive installed very well to the Linux machine and is now a permanent fixture on it. <br /> <br />The external drive is quiet when both idle and busy, in fact, sometimes a check of the drive light in the on/off switch is done in order to obtain visual confirmation that the backups are actually occuring. <br /> <br />There was no surprise with the actual size of the storage capacity of the drive.  It is advertised as having 200GB but years ago the hard drive industry decided to rewrite the definition of the size of a byte to be 1000 bits as opposed to the industry standard of 1024 bits per byte.   <br /> <br />Overall considering the cost, flexibility, functionality and expandability of the external hard drive, this is an excellent buy.