HOW-TO: FAT32/NTFS/ext3 for Windows/Linux cross-compatible
 

I own a NAS D-Link DNS-320 running fun_plug 0.7 & transmissionBT.

I just bought a Transcend 2.5 inch 2TB USB HDD which is preformatted to NTFS.

Just wondering whether my NAS(linux) can write to my USB HDD for a reliable storage for transmissionBT.

Otherwise, if writing to NTFS is unstable in linux, how should I format my USB HDD. I know I could format as FAT32... but FAT32 has a 4GB file size limit.
Is it possible to format USB HDD as ext3 (linux file system)... and still compatible/read/write by Windows XP/7/8?

Far as I know Windows will not see any of the ext2/3/4 file system types, I just tried it with ext2 and ext4.

Linux should see NTFS fine though. Stable/not-stable? The file system is fine.

There are a bunch of options if you have multiple machines. Such as the Linux machine can provide and NFS mount or Samba mount for the Windows machine to see, however they'd have to be different machines (unless there's a way to do it via virtual machines) and then you could format that external drive as ext2/3/4 and then make the files available via a network share.

There is a Windows driver that will let you read ext2 (and ext3 without journalling) only on XP and Vista: http://www.fs-driver.org/

otherwise you'll have to use NTFS, which is perfectly stable using NTFS-3G.

The spec for the Dlink DNS-320, available here shows: which rather looks like you have no write access to an external USB drive. Sounds a bit weird to me.

My :twocents:

Play Bonny!

:hattip: