Should external USB drives be always formated as FAT32 ?

Dani1973 · 12-22-2010, 11:44 AM

If a USB drive is used under Linux and Windows, what would be the best file system? FAT32?

Would it harm to have the drive formated as NTFS?
How reliable is Linux when writing to NTFS today and is it worth taking the risk?

I am asking this because I am pretty sure that there are a lot of peoples out there with external drives that are formated in NTFS.
The main reason for this is that a OS like Windows XP cannot format a FAT32 partition bigger then 32GB and without noticing users might format their drives to NTFS.

TobiSGD · 12-22-2010, 12:05 PM

I often format my USB drives in NTFS, especially when I have to put files on them that are larger as 4 GB, which is impossible with FAT32. I use NTFS-3G for handling those devices and never had any problems with it. Maybe you shouldn't do it if you want to transport important files for your really important presentation, but as I said, never had any problems here.

jiml8 · 12-22-2010, 12:15 PM

ntfs-3g seems to work fine, even for repairing damaged ntfs volumes. There is no reason anymore to use FAT for anything, except DOS-based repair disks.

honeybadger · 12-22-2010, 12:21 PM

MS does not recommend FAT for more than 2MB I think. I dual booted for about a year with xp and debian had no issues with ntfs at all (all music files were on ntfs).
Now all the drives I have are formatted with ntfs because they have to work with some stupid winduhs machines

.

silvyus_06 · 12-22-2010, 12:56 PM

i don't know about you but i use ntfs for a big partition on my hard drive on which i put all my files all my movies . theres no windows system on it and it is corrupted . but ntfs-3g seems to handle it fine.

so i think theres no risk in using that ntfs....