Filesystems For Removable Disks?

An anonymous reader asks: "I have recently (as in today ) acquired a 250GB external HD with both USB2 and Firewire ports, with an eye to using it to carry around all my stuff (my humungous e-mail archive, ISO images of whetever distro I'm running, music and work files - I do a lot of database work, so I often need to move 40GB+ database dumps). The thing is, In order to make proper use of it I have to be able to mount and write to it on all three platforms I use: Windows (easy, it comes formatted as FAT32), Linux (trivial mount syntax) and Mac OS X (it just works as is, since it also supports FAT32). However, I'd like to get rid of FAT32." What filesystems, aside from the FAT varieties, have decent support across the major operating systems?

"The disk comes factory-formatted (Windows doesn't allow you to format a disk this big as a single FAT32 partition), and even though I'm not running against any FAT32 limitations yet, I was wondering if there was a better filesystem to use. NTFS would be perfect (given its rock-solid transaction support - always useful on an external drive), but the Linux versions are far from reliable for large file writes and Mac OS X lacks it. ext3 isn't supported on Windows or the Mac (as far as I know).

In short, my requirements are:

• The filesystem must be read/write for Windows, Linux and Mac
• The disk must have a single partition
• There must be tools available for all three OSs to format the HD with that filesystem in case something goes wrong and I'm away from home base

However, if I'm to be stuck with FAT32, I'd appreciate pointers to utilities for reformatting the HD with a single 250GB partition for Mac OS X and Windows (the built-in Disk Manager only lets me format 40GB partitions in FAT32, to force people to move to NTFS)."

Comments

Give it a rest!

[avalys]

To all of you saying "FAT works fine", consider that the OP may be asking the question because he wants a filesystem that's faster, more reliable or perhaps more secure (encrypted?) than FAT. Just because FAT works doesn't mean it works the best. He's asking if there are any alternatives, besides what he's already using.

fat32 is your best bet.

[dougmc]

Like it or not, fat32 is the only option that works on all the OSs in question and doesn't cost extra money.

Your other options include Paragon's Mount Everything and their Ext2fs Everywhere (which is really just a subset of `Mount Everything'.) These programs let you mount ext2/ext3 under Windows, or let you mount NTFS under Linux (I don't know how good that is -- I know that Linux has some NTFS support itself, but know it's not very mature.)

If that's not clear enough -- if you want to spend some money, spend it with Paragon and you can use ext3 or NTFS. If not, stick with fat32.

ext2 is a valid option

[nsrbrake]

as well as using ext3 under linux.

See here for general info:
http://www.ibiblio.org/mdw/HOWTO/Filesystem s-HOWTO -6.html
And here for windows tools, but read the link... First.
http://www.it.fht-esslingen.de/~zimmerma/s oftware/ ltools.htm
And finally for OSX:
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/m acosx/ 18619

Play nice and have fun!

Re:Windows is your limiting factor

[GiMP]

Linux supports ext*, fat*, iso9660 xfs, jfs, reiserfs, efs, isofs, ufs, udf (experimental), minix, VxFS, HPFS, HFS, HFS+ (limited?), QNX, ntfs (limited), BFS, Amiga FFS, ADFS, BeFS, and finally System V/Xenix/V7/Coherent FS (that is a long one!).
MacOS 10.x supports HFS, HFS+, UDF, ISO9660, AFS, and FAT*
Windows XP supports ISO9660, NTFS, FAT*, and UDF.

I believe that MacOS and Windows both require 3rd party software to use UDF.. but I could be wrong about that.

The solutions would be FAT*, ISO9660, and UDF. ISO9660 is read-only and I've never heard of someone using UDF on a harddrive (it is for those 'direct cds' you might have seen). FAT* sucks, but it works everywhere. It might be worth the effort to see if UDF could be used at all, but a small FAT32 partition would have to be made to accomodate the utilities for using it on the target system.

Before everyone flames the story submiter for being bias against Microsoft, the issue is that FAT really does suck and it would be great if there was something else that everyone supported.

Personally, I'd like to have a 6 gigabyte external (usb/firewire) harddrive that I could boot MacOS9 from AND share it between Linux and Windows computer. I guess I'll keep dreaming for a while :)

Re:I think you're stuck...

[babbage]

But then, Jaguar is the current version of OSX, and it does not AFAIK have NTFS support. Maybe Pathern (10.3) will? ;-)

I think you've about nailed it though: while there are a lot of valid criteria for selecting a good filesystem (security, permissions, metadata, etc), one of them in this case has to be portability, and without the help of third party software, no version of Windows has support for anything other than FAT* or NTFS. And while NTFS isn't such a bad filesystem, incomplete support for NTFS's security mechanisms has meant that there are few if any non-Windows drivers that can both read and write the format. Maybe, as you say, Panter will have this, but that still leaves some maturing on the Linux side.

My best idea -- which maybe isn't viable to the original "anonymous reader" -- is to let the single partition requirement slip. If the drive has one or two FAT32 partitions, that can meet the portability requirement. Then a more advanced filesystem can be used for OSX/Linux interchange. I know you have more flexibility if you just need to support those two, but I'm not sure what your best options are. OSX will let you use either HFS+ (modernized version of the old MacOS filesystem) or UFS (Unix FileSystem, which AFAIK is also what the *BSDs use. UFS might be a pretty good choice then -- it should be mountable on not only OSX & Linux, but also Solaris, BSD, Irix, and other *nix variants. I don't know what support OSX has for ext2, ReiserFS etc, but if it isn't there already then the architecture of the system is such that adding third party support should in theory be easier than adding any other drivers to Windows.

Re:hm

[shaitand]

FAT32 has some severe limitations, one I'm sure that is ringing in his head is the 2gb file limitation.

not to mention other things (although for the purpose carry crap from one place to another it's probably good enough), speed, stability, security, etc. Although NTFS sucks as well, at least it's better than fat32...

The FAT32 Limits:

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's what I think the original poster was trying to get across, based on skimming the MS KB:

• 4GB file limit (minus one byte)
• Cannot format a FAT32 partition larger than 32GB (both before and after you setup XP
• Cannot format the thing on another OS save Windows 98 (which is the only thing that seems t have USB, Firewire and large volume FAT32), which is plain ridiculous.

So, given that (and the obvious lack of a journaled FS across the three OSes), I guess instead of ranting on about Windows being the limit and proposing the use of Gentoo LiveCDs and magical incantations, we should cut our losses, accept that the guy will have to slice his files with split, and at least try to find ways of formatting very large hard disks in FAT32 under both Mac OS X and Linux - something no-one seems to have managed to provide an answer to, and which was left dangling off the post...

PartitionMagic? Any free alternatives around?

(How many people actually READ the full post text, I wonder...? Maybe it's the banner?)

Re:Windows is your limiting factor

[beat.bolli]

But I guess its considered fratenizing with the enemy.

The problem is not so much the fraternizing, but the fact that the installable file system interface documentation is not available to your average open source hacker. The IFS Kit costs $899 + S&H. You just can't integrate other file systems cleanly without these docs.

In fact, there are utilities to read ext2 and ISO9660 FSs, but they are stand-alone and require you to extract the files to your native partition before they can be used.

ext2

[Ann Coulter]

You could use the ext2 filesystem. Mac OS X Ext2 Filesystem is a beta and Explore2efs is available for Windows.