as a computer security student, and with computer forensics apparently a fairly imporant part of the field, its something we learn. Most of our texts reccommend the use of FAT hard drives, and moderately hacked versions of MS dos for forensics work

for the former, modern windows versions have a cap on the maximum size you can format a FAT drive to (though they read them fine) , one option is to use limux but http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/index.htm?fat32format.htm is a lovely little tool that will format large FAT drives in windows

the other tool is a free app which allows hex editing to disks, for when you need to go hack up a io.sys to disable disc compression (granted that the *smart* thing would be to use a custom freedos distro, and release the code for it) for making a boot disk for forensics
http://www.roadkil.net/Sectedit.html