USB Hard disk drives! Supported or not?

[hoojchoons]

I'm thinking of buying an external USB HD since the 6 gigs on the laptop did prove very limiting. Does any of you guys know if there's adequate support for external USB HD's under the 2.4.* kernel. Has any of you guys got one?

Thanks in advance  

[creedon]

There's definitly USB support in 2.4*, but I think that I'd do some research before I bought the drive; try to find out if the Manufacturer of the drive you want supports open source.  USB's kind of a basket of snakes, and you want to find out as much as you can BEFORE you lay out your money.
Also check here:
http://www.dotaster.com~shuu/linux/usbmgr/

[voidmain]

A USB hard drive?  Hope you're not planning to use any sort of high speed apps on it.  USB1 is slooooooow. It's OK for items that don't require a lot of bandwidth but hard drives don't fit that category, specially large ones that you may want to move a lot of data around on.

[hoojchoons]

You're propably right. I was having second thoughts too but I was just wondering. I asked a few friends who told me the same. Bad idea for large amounts of data.