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

[Andrew]

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.