[Wlug] USB drive & logical volumes

Santa brought me a nice 80 GB "portable" USB drive. My intended use is a combination of backup and transporting personal files to/from work (I want to remove them from my work hard drive). Both home and work systems are FC3, but may be FC4 sometime soon. I was ready to partitioning (4 GB fat, remainder ext3) when I started reading up on logical volumes. They seem pretty neat, but I wonder if they are useful for a portable drive. In particular, I can see that some/all of the definitions for the group and volume are in /dev/mapper, so I'd have to duplicate some of the setup on both machines. Any recommendations or experience? Would I be better off with physical partitions for this use? TIA, Bill