External HD setup

[Brian Olesky]

A few weeks ago I got a new external hard drive, downloaded Carbon Copy
Cloner, and copied the contents of my internal drive onto the external
drive. However, I've since read (on this list and in a MacWorld article)
that I was supposed to format the new drive first. Although it seems to be
working okay anyway, is that something I need to go back and do with the
disk utility software? Could not having formatted it be the reason that
Carbon Copy Cloner seems to hang up a lot when I use it? Are there any other
issues involved in not pre-formatting the external drive? And if I go back
and format it now, are there any advantages to having partitions? All I
really want the drive for is to have a backup of my stuff, and to store some
seldom used files that are threatening to outgrow my internal 20 gig hard
drive.

Thanks,
Brian