I recently purchased a 750 GB Seagate FreeAgent USB drive. It will mainly be used on a file and media server. The catch here is that my client (laptop) runs Ubuntu Hardy, but the actual drive will be attached to a Fedora 8 Server box. Not sure if that really matters...but worth mentioning.

I already have a 500 GB FreeAgent on the system formatted to HFS+ (Apple File System). I need this 500 GB drive to stay with HFS, as I also have Apples in my environment on occasion; but I've found that either the HFS file system is crap, or probably more likely, Linux is having a difficult time properly managing it as it constantly needs to get rebuilt.

So, that said, what Linux friendly file system should I use on my new 750 GB drive? Ext2, Ext3, Ext4, or something completely separate?

Thanks for feedback in advance!

I'd go with ext3. It is basically ext2 with journaling, so OSX and Windows should be able to mount it just fine. Just as every Linux distribution also should.

For smaller disks, I would go as far as recommending FAT32, but that format is not at all suitable for your needs/disk size. I'd still recommend you creating smaller partitions though.

When you say media server, are you talking about large files (like 2GB or larger video)? If so, you may want to look into something like xfs or jfs as they handle large files easier. Moving or deleting a large video file on ext3 can take minutes...

Formatting the drive as aI type to XFS after doing some research. I will be hosting rather large files, and don't anticipate too many improper shutdowns as i've got a petty reliable battery backup solution.

Thanks again to the linux questions community! Thanks again!