Hi -

I'm looking for advice on how to proceed with a hard drive upgrade.

For a long time now I have always stored my data on a second physical drive (currently NTFS). I'm using Windblows XP and Kubuntu. They are on my primary drive.

I'm going to a larger data storage drive and am wondering what file system I should use so I can share files between the two OSs?

I see there are ways for each OS to access drives partitioned in FAT32, NTFS, or EXT2-3. I'm doing my best to dump the OS from Redmond but am still using it for certain business related tasks.

The new drive is 250 gigs. I guess that can be an issue if I'm formatting from XP in FAT32 (a built in limitation)? Also, I read that FAT32 will cause performance issues under Linux, right? i have lots of music I like to play.

So should I format in EXT2-3 or NTFS? Or do some of you have other suggestions?

Thanks!

If nothing else, FAT won't preserve permissions on the files, but that might not be a concern for you..nowadays Linux operating systems can not only read, but write to NTFS too, and I imagine it's somewhat reliable nowadays (before it used to be hoping for the best when writing something). So therefore NTFS could be an option, and you could then use it with other computers (with Windows or a recent Linux OS); if you used ext2/3, you would first have to make sure the other computer had the needed software installed that let it access ext2/3 filesystems. On the other hand, if you're using Windows only occasionally and maybe dropping it off in the future, I'd stick with ext3 (or ext2, but it's older and not journalling like ext3 -- this could be important to you, though), because with it the ownership of files (and other permissions) can be saved, and it works "natively" with Linux -- more than NTFS, anyway. A non-technical thing is that I wouldn't personally want to support a Windows filesystem -- at least as long as they don't want to have Windows support other filesystems besides FAT and NTFS.

Shortly put, I'd format it as ext3 and install the supporting software onto your Windows to handle it. It's not as pretty on Windows as NTFS would be, but you said you're using Windows only for "certain business related tasks". If it's more than I think, and you actually are using the disk more than just occasionally, then you maybe are better off with NTFS for now. You could always turn it to ext3 later if you decide to stop using Windows, and in my opinion the ease of use is still the primary matter when working with different operating systems and business that has to be done (since it shouldn't be a problem for Linux, why make it a problem for Windows?) After all, if you have the appropriate NTFS "driver" in your Kubuntu, which I think you do, it's "invisible" to you whether or not it's ext3 or NTFS - with proper configuration, or just automation these days, the drive gets mounted, read, written and umounted just the same way no matter what fs you're using. On Windows, if it's ext3, you might have to use something that doesn't look like "built-in"..

Probably you should use ext2/3 if you have the windows tools.

Given the choice, always use open formats.

Note, XP can use linux formatted fat32 partitions. That way you get around the MS (32GiB?) restrictions.

Thanks guys! So how well does a Linux formatted Fat 32 partition perform compared to EXT2/3? Since it's just data it should be OK, no? Could I stick my /home on the data drive too? It would make changing and testing distros easy.

What do you mean by "perform"?

My solution:
Shared data on ext3 partitions (on a separate drive)
ext2fsd driver in Windows
NO shared /home (When distro-hopping, I don't want to even try to have all settings the same)
Certain files (eg the thunderbird and firefox profiles) are on a shared data partition and then linked into whatever is the "distro du jour"

Qualifier: Windows on this machine is only used rarely and I want the control over permissions that one gets with ext3.