[NBLUG/talk] Filesystem recommendation for a large external drive

Barry Stump barry.stump at gmail.com
Wed Nov 8 20:35:46 PST 2006


On 11/8/06, Andrew <argonaut at gmx.co.uk> wrote:
> Barry Stump wrote on Tue, 7 Nov 2006 16:03:05 -0800:
>
> > I have recently acquired a large (500Gb) external USB drive,
> > which I wish to use with both linux and OS X.  It came with a
> > single FAT32 partition, but what with the inefficiencies of
> > large FAT32 partitions, as well as problems I'm encountering
> > with command line tools (e.g. running "df -h" just hangs), I'd
> > like to replace it with a better performing file system that
> > is friendly to both operating systems. Any suggestions?  I
> > don't mind installing packages on either system, provided they
> > are stable enough for daily use.
>
> Well, I was about to suggest ext2 because I know there is an
> ext2 driver for OS X (http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsx/),
> but then I had a look at the project. There are a lot of
> complaints of problems in the forum. At least one problem
> specifically involves external USB drives and seems to be quite
> serious. There are also a number of open bugs that can cause
> crashes or kernel panics. Not exactly good for a project that
> self-describes its DevelopmentStatus as "5 - Production/Stable".
> Looks to me like it's "4 - Beta" at best.
>
> I can't recommend HFS+, either. I've used Linux's hfsplus driver
> myself, and while reading has never been a problem, I can't say
> the same for writing. In my experience, both OS X and OS 9 get
> very unhappy when Linux writes to an HFS+ partition.
>
> If you can wait until next summer (no, I don't suppose you can),
> OS X should be gaining NTFS write support. Apple's NTFS driver
> will be based on Linux's NTFS-3G driver, which is already very
> capable. Assuming Apple gets it right, NTFS will probably be
> your best choice... next summer.
>
> Until then, it looks like you're stuck with FAT32. Why don't you
> try partitioning the drive into, say, four 125 GB partitions?
> You'll still be stuck with a 4 GB file size limit, but it might
> alleviate some of the other problems you're experiencing.
>
> Good luck.
>
> A.

I'm going to try ext2 for now, since for the most part, writing will
be done from the linux machine and the Mac can mount it read-only.
Pity the only file system supported out of the box by linux, os x, and
windows has so many limitations.

-Barry



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