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Best Format For OS X and Linux HDD?

Posted by timothy on from the cross-the-beams dept.

dogmatixpsych writes "I work in a neuroimaging laboratory. We mainly use OS X but we have computers running Linux and we have colleagues using Linux. Some of the work we do with Magnetic Resonance Images produces files that are upwards of 80GB. Due to HIPAA constraints, IT differences between departments, and the size of files we create, storage on local and portable media is the best option for transporting images between laboratories. What disk file system do Slashdot readers recommend for our external HDDs so that we can readily read and write to them using OS X and Linux? My default is to use HFS+ without journaling but I'm looking to see if there are better suggestions that are reliable, fast, and allow read/write access in OS X and Linux."

5 of 253 comments (clear)

  1. HIPAA Constraints? by fm6 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    By "HIPAA Constraints" I assume you mean the privacy rule. I would think that this rule would prevent you from using sneakernet to transmit files. Unless you're encrypting your portable disks, and somehow it doesn't sound like you are.

    Fun reading:

    http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9141172/Health_Net_says_1.5M_medical_records_lost_in_data_breach

  2. No Filesystem by Rantastic · · Score: 5, Informative

    If you are only moving files from one system to another, and do not need to edit them on the portable drives, skip the filesystem and just use tar. Tar will happily write to and read from raw block devices... In fact, that is exactly what it was designed to do. A side benefit of this approach is that you won't lose any drive capacity to filesystem overhead.

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  3. Re:NTFS by Tirs · · Score: 5, Funny

    Hah! In my company we call it "NoTeFíeS" (for non Spanish-speaking people: "Don'tTrustIt").

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    Strength, balance, courage and reason. If you know what's this about, contact me!
  4. Re:UDF IS ACTUALLY A SOLUTION by marquise2000 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Ok everybody's occupied with surreal suggestions, but anyway:
    *UDF* is quite awesome as a on disk format for LinuxOSX data exchange, because it has a file size limit around 128TB, supports all the posix permissions, hard and soft links and whatnots. There is a nice whitepaper summing it all up:
    http://www.13thmonkey.org/documentation/UDF/UDF_whitepaper.pdf

    If you want to use UDF on a hard disk, prepare it under linux:
    1) Install uddftools
    2) wipe the first few blocks of the hard disk, i.e. dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=1k count=100
    3) create the file system : mkudffs --media-type=hd --utf8 /dev/sdb (that's right, UDF takes the whole disk, now partitions)

    If you plug this into OSX, the drive will show up as "LinuxUDF". I am using this setup for years to move data between linux and OSX machines.

    --

    Marquise

    -- I need a new sig.

  5. Re:ext2 works. ntfs works. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    This is dangerous advice. There are numerous reports of instability and NTFS volume corruption when forcing 10.6 to mount NTFS volumes R/W. Apple seems to have turned NTFS write off by default for a good reason, it's not done yet.