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

hm

[Anonymous Coward]

Fat32 works across all, so I cannot use it.

OK.

The question reworded

[Anonymous Coward]

Hello, I currently have a portable storage system working just fine with FAT32 across three different platforms. However, this is much too easy to me and I'd like to bash Windows at the same time, so I'm asking for advice on how to make my life difficult and go with some obscure filesystem which won't have many third-party tools available to alter it if something goes wrong.

Have you ever heard "If it ain't broke, don't fix it?"

If not, can you at least tell me WHY you want to break a good thing? It works FINE for you in all 3 OSes! Is your question a troll? If so, damn fine work!

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.

Re:Give it a rest!

[torpor]

Right, exactly. This isn't a 'switch', its a 'compare'.

I myself am very interested in the answer. I wonder if the solution may be to have an ext3 (or xfs, or jffs) shim for Win32, also?

Man, if only there were an *open*, *journaled*, *fast* and *efficient* filesystem which all 3 OS's were allowed to play well with.

Seems to me if the answer to this "Ask Slashdot" ends up being "just use FAT32", then there's an opportunity for a decent OSS project: completely open, cross-platform, fast, journaled filesystem, with code tarballs for all major platforms.

Hmmm...

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.