After much deliberation I finally decided to purchase an external hard drive to provide for a complete backup solution for my server.

I finally decided on the Western Digital 500GB MyBook Essential. I duly brought it home and connected it to my Linux server (Mandriva 2006.0), but after initially recognising the drive it basically produced a lot of errors in /var/log/messages.

This was very disturbing, but I had tested the drive on an Ubuntu 6.10 system, and it worked perfectly, so I built the Mandriva 2007.0 kernel (2.6.17), and bootloader utils from source rpms, and installed them, voila new drive working perfectly.

Now I have a nice 232GBs of backups using a generational rsync script I wrote, that keeps 120 days of backups on the single 500GB drive.