External HDD question

I have seen a rather nice Seagate external portable HDD,
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/07/24 ... eagent_go/

By default it comes formatted as NTFS, the article indicates that non Windows users should reformat to FAT32 - I assume I will have to do that (which is fine, as it's simple enough, and I am aware of the large file size restrictions, but that will not be an issue)

This HDD, like many other portable ones, takes its power from the PC - it has 2 USB cables - one for data and one for power - which join to form one connection to the HDD its self - I assume this will be OK on the AA1? - How much of a battery drain is it likely to be?

I know the review mentions the other applications bump up the price and they don't work when formatted, but this doesn't bother me as I have found a decent price on it, making it cheaper than a bare bones 80gb one.

So, ultimately, will this work with the AA1 and is it likely to reduce the battery considerably?

 

You can get NTFS support by installing ntfs-3g.

I believe to format a drive with a FAT filesystem on Linpus you'll need to install dosfstools, this will provide command line tools for formatting to a FAT filesystem, and gparted will provide a GUI frontend for these tools.

The power connector should be okay to power the drive, my rather old external drive works with two USB cables to power it, I expect newer drives might be a bit more power efficient and will maybe work with just one, I believe someone on these forums has reported running their external drive with just one connector. As to battery life, I don't really know, but I'd expect it to reduce it by about 30 minutes.