Linksys WRT350N USB Storage > linux

Are you only running linux machines? If you have any windows machines, I'd install samba.

I was looking at that router, but went for the 330N. I figured I'd never use the usb feature. Just another headache.

Incidentally, my netgear rangemax gigabit router gave up the ghost. I have no clue what happened. It was a fry's refurb, so I feel less bad about it, but still it was about $60 that lasted maybe 6 months.

I was never a fan of Linksys, however enough people convinced their gear doesn't suck anymore since Cisco bought them.

Can you connect the hard drive directly to your linux machine and access the drive? Mandriva 2008 can write to NTFS partitions if the ntfs-3g package is installed.

Suse can talk to NTFS as well, but that doesn't mean much over the network. When you install samba, it looks like windows networking. The linux machine should show up under "tux-net".

Linux boxes handling NTFS directly is probably OK, but there are a few flavors of NTFS. My understanding is much of the data regarding NTFS is not published, so in theory there are potential bugs depending on how well the outside world hacked NTFS. Samba uses windows networking, which gets around direct writing to the NTFS partition. That is, the windows machine does the writing.