Maxtor Personal Storage 3100

Having recently graduated from the University of Waterloo's Rhetoric & Professional Writing major (Honours B.A.) I decided to go out and splurge a little. I bought myself the second most-expensive school ring, and a Maxtor Personal Storage 3100 80GB USB hard drive. I asked the Best Buy guy if he knew anyone that had used Linux with it. He didn't have a clue, but he did mention I could bring it back within 14 days with receipt. The response was less than I was expecting. Normally I don't like to promote big box stores. Best Buy was across from work, the only reason I bought there. I am going to mention the Staples off Ottawa Street because the last time I was there the person I was talking to actually had a clue about Linux. He didn't say he ran Linux, but stated that the USB wireless mouse I was going to buy should work if I'm using the 2.6 kernel.

The PS3100 has behaved quite well. I packed it up the other day, along with my notebook. No data loss because of transportation. While transporting the drive I couldn't help but think back in horror about the first hard drive I ever bought, a MFM hard drive. If you're not familiar with MFM drives, they had to be "parked" before transportation. Under the belly of the drive there was usually a little knob you pushed up to park the drive heads. Being relatively green to PC's I didn't know this and got home with a useless hard drive - and no refunds.

With the rise of large USB keys, iPods, you might ask "why buy an external hard drive, let alone one that cannot be removed and inserted into something else?" Stability. While this drive may go, it's so inexpensive that replacing it won't be a big chore. And it's really handy for hosting Linux isos, or using as a base for a Linux install fest.