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

Windows is your limiting factor

[TheSHAD0W]

With Windows, your choices are FAT16, FAT32 and NTFS. NTFS isn't amazingly portable, so you're pretty much stuck.

So don't do the formating on Windows. Duh.

[Anonymous Coward]

The important fact that you're missing is that it IS broke.

He can't reformat the drive as a single partition. Perhaps you missed the parts where he said "the built-in Disk Manager only lets me format 40GB partitions in FAT32" and "I do a lot of database work, so I often need to move 40GB+ database dumps". That's a serious usability problem.

He's obviously using two other OSes without that artificial 40GB limit. He could just use one of them when he needs to format.

Re:Samba to the rescue!?

[GiMP]

"I often need to move 40GB+ database dumps"

Does that answer your question?

Re:repartition or you're stuck

[kasperd]

Unfortunately, same goes for ext2 in general. You can compile your kernel with large file support, but your applications and filesystem drivers need to support it as well.

It is true that applications need to support large files, however the most important applications already do. And ext2 does support files larger than 2GB. I just created a 17247252480 bytes file on my /boot filesystem (the only with ext2). This is the maximum with 1k blocks. The limit is caused by the maximum number of blocks addressable with three levels of indirection. It is slightly larger than 16GB because you can also use the direct, single, and double indirection. With three levels of indirection you get 2^4 times as large files by doubling the block size. In other words with 2kb block size you can create files as large as 256GB. With 4kb block size you run into another limitation at 2TB file size.