I have a dual boot system with Xp and redhat Linux on seperate partitions on my harddrive. I own a sony vaio notebook with pent3m 256mb ram [which im upgrading to 512] and 1.13GHz. I'd like to get a seperate external hard drive to store all my big files. Right now my freespace on my XP partition is less than 20% which makes defragmenting next to impossible. I have multiple usb ports and an extra monitor and printer port. Is this adequate to physically connect the hard drive to my system or do I need to get a server or something? Its sole purpose is going to be storage.

Do you have USB 2.0 ports? If not, it will run extremely slow. I just gave up on trying to get a Belkin USB 2.0 external drive case to work with a WD 60 gig hard drive (new). I have tried every jumper setting on the drive that I can think of and it just won't run at UBS 2.0 speeds. My USB ports are a mix of 2.0 and 1.x and maybe that has something to do with it running slow. I have no way to test the speed of the USB 2.0 ports to see if they are capable of running full speed. I mentioned all of this because I am not sure that an external drive is the best or easiest way to go. I finally ended up just installing the extra drive as a slave to my other drive.

Hmmm...I think my ports are 1.0 My notebook was bought just before the advent of usb 2.0. Maybe i should just build a cheapy computer to dump everything into through my router.