[ale] Disk Format Question - Best choice for 500 Gig?

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Mon, 2007-03-12 at 15:43 -0500, Preston Boyington wrote:

> Thompson Freeman wrote:
> <snipped>
> > I've got a 500 Gig hard disk...I  
> > expect the best format for the hard disk is a fat/msdos  
> > type system, and I think I want the fat32 type.
> > 
> 
> most likely you will wind up with FAT32.  it is supported by virtually
> all major operating systems (although purists will probably need a
> kernel patch).  also it will handle your disk size without a problem.
> 
> that said, i have had (on a couple of occasions) my FAT32 partition to
> go nuts when connected to various WinXP machines.  quite literally i
> had to format the partition in order to use it again.  nothing easily
> recovered the data and i noticed that it has mainly happened with SP1.


Microsoft doesn't support FAT32 filesystems over 30 (32?) GB in size,
even though the hard limit for FAT32 is 8TiB (not that I would want a
FAT32 FS with that much data entrusted to it).  My external USB drive
has two partitions; one 8 MB partition that holds EXT2 IFS for Windows
(http://www.fs-driver.org/) and the remainder is an ext3 formatted Linux
partition.  This has worked for me for quite some time, and the  FreeBSD
system has support for ext2, as well.  Not sure about the other members
of the BSD family, though.

FAT32 is not what I would call a very reliable system, and if you're
going to use it, I would recommend always having the data mirrored on
something more reliable.  I find myself reformatting large FAT media too
often for my taste.

It seems that there is more-or-less stable R/W support for NTFS in
Ubuntu's Feisty, btw.  They even have NTFS FS creation tools.  I have
not tested them extensively, though, and it goes without saying that
NTFS is unreadable in non-NT based versions of Windows and DOS systems
without an extra driver.

    -- Mike

--
Michael B. Trausch
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