What do I need to know before setting up my new hard disk?

Hi all, my first post here.

I'm using OSX Panther and I've just bought a hard drive and an external enclosure just for storing music, photos and movies.

I've no experience of partitioning or anything with hard disks. Do I just go to disk utitlity and will that see to everything?

Also I heard there are some problems with data loss with external hard drives and the firmware might need updating. How can I find out if the drive I'm using is affected and if I need to do this?

plug it in and open disk utility. select the hard drive and open "erase" tab. i sugest to completely erase the disc (i did same to mine). pick the name and choose mac os extended (journaled). this should eliminate all incompatability issues. sometimes ext HDs have some sort of data or software on it from manufacturer (invisable files), some ID tags ets. these may scrue up big time. so erase the disc completely. after that you will see that disks custom icon will change to standard icon for firewire disk. it means there is nothing left from third party tags and its copletely mac os standard volume. thats it! I never had any problems with my ext HD (lacie)
good luck!