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Cross-OS File System That Sucks Less?

Posted by kdawson on from the just-mount-it dept.

An anonymous reader writes "I recently got an external hard disk with USB 2.0/Firewire/Firewire 800/eSATA to be used for backup and file exchange — my desktop runs Linux (with a Windows partition for games but no data worth saving), and the laptop is a MacBook Pro. So the question popped up: what kind of filesystem is best for this kind of situation? Is there a filesystem that works well under Linux, MacOS X, and Windows? Linux has HFS+ support but apparently doesn't support journaling and there's also an issue with the case-insensitivity of HFS+. Are we stuck with crummy VFAT forever or are there efforts underway to bring a modern filesystem (I'm thinking something like ZFS, BeFS, or XFS) to all platforms? Or are there other clever solutions like storing ISO images and loop-mounting those?"

2 of 449 comments (clear)

  1. Quick answer: No by WebHikerOriginal · · Score: 1, Troll

    Since you have to find the lowest common denominator supported by all your platforms, your weak link is obviously (and as usual) Microsoft Windows.
    So the most "modern" fs you'll be able to use is unfortunately NTFS.

  2. Fragments by jlehtira · · Score: 0, Troll

    Would you care to explain how this could possibliy, logistically or physically even be possble? Fragmentation is the only thing that could slow a FS over time unless the FS used a really stupid indexing system for the File Table. And yet not only is NTFS is still one of the best FS for handing fragmentation, ever, it has a well managed and fast file table indexing system.

    I don't know about the fragmentation really. Personal experience here - just checked my partitions and found many files that are stored in thousands of "fractions". The OS installation is not a year old either, and I think I did defrag everything at least once already. Add to that, even if I defragment the drive, usually the tool cannot repair my NTFS drives completely. Moving the problem files back and forth between the two partitions does help though.

    Ext3, Reiserfs, other Linux FSes though, all I hear is that the filesystem avoids fragmentation by itself and doesn't need to be defragged. How is that not much better than NTFS? Come to think of it, maybe a big part of the slowdown I see accumulating on Windows is because of this NTFS goodness..