[Novalug] Recommendation: USB Large harddrives 400G(and up) What is a good filesystem to use?

[DonJr]

I just got a USB connected hard drive, says "500G" on the box. (but)
 Plugged it in and Gnome(i guess) mounted it at "/media/My Data".
 {-:Where has the fun(*) of connecting a new device gone to? :-}

What would be a good format to use for the filesystem on it?
  (The pre formatted one of FAT-32 is to limited, for my needs.)

It will only be accessed/used by systems running Linux, period.

My first personal choice is as one large "ext3", but there are others.
 As it will be used for mostly (short term)backups and/or archive type
data, both of which may files that are larger then 2G among them.

Any recommendations for what to use and why you'd pick it?

--  
 DonJr