Add an external drive to Linux

I recently bought a Simpledrive 500GB to do some rsyncing backups for my servers. Since it was formatted in the ntfs file system, none of my servers could recognize it.
Below are instructions, using Ubuntu desktop, on how to reformat the drive in a file system that Linux systems will recognize.

First thing is to install gparted, if not already installed, open up terminal and enter the following command:

sudo apt-get install gparted

After it’s installed, you can run the program under System — Administration — Partition Editor. The program will look something like the screenshot below:

As you can see from the next screenshot, the external drive has a ntfs file system:

Now making sure that you have the correct drive selected, mine was /dev/sdb, as shown above, click on the partition and then click the delete button.  After it is deleted, your screen should look something like this:

Now select the partition and click new, I am leaving the defaults as is since it will be running on another Linux system. You can change the file system to whichever you think will suit you best. Click add and then apply twice to start. This takes a bit of time.

After the operation is complete, you will now be able to mount the external drive. I needed to power the drive down and back on again for it to show up properly in the program.