is not essential to its use. Generally its used either for backup or encryption purposes. If your Win2K machine has USB functionality, it can use the drive just fine but you may run into some size limitations. If it comes formatted as FAT32, you'll want to repartition and format the drive using NTFS and Win2k can do that. The drive just becomes like any other attached to the system with it's own drive letter(s) depending on the number of partitions created.

Now, I'm going to guess your motherboard offers only USB 1.x. This will leave the drive a bit on the pokey side but it should work. I'll suggest that, if you want Win7 compatibility as well, that you use Win2k to initialize the drive and not Win7 or some third party solution. Good luck.