Hi all!

After (yet) another harddrive failure, I decided to get a couple of HD's to store all my music, personal files, movies and TV-series. I just can't decide which FS to format them. The first FS that came to my mind was FAT32. With that I could just plug the HD on any machine, on any operating system and use it right away. However, FAT32 has (a lot) of shortcomings. For the first, it has a file size limit of 4.x(?) GB, which would make it impossible to store most DVD-iso images on it.

My second thought was to use NTFS. NTFS addresses FAT32 size limit (among other things). Finally, the linux driver to write to NTFS is at a stable state. However, I am going more to FreeBSD or Solaris for my main machine and I could not find anything on the Internet about the Linux NTFS driver being compiled on those operating systems. I can't see why they couldn't, but since I have no Unix machines at home for the moment (which is also driving me crazy), except for some Sparc/webserver, I can't test them.

So here is the question: Which FS should I use on USB-HDD. I am aiming to buy one 500GB or 2/3 disks 250GB.

Another question: Is it worthy buying bigger HD's? Since I have not been so lucky lately with HD's, I was actually thinking to buy a couple of smaller disks (like 160GB) and spread my data among them, so in the case of one crash, I would not go losing 500GB worthy of data.

Since it is only a bunch of movies (which I mostly have in DVD's, except for a couple of Korean films and series which cannot be found anywhere, or else I would buy them ^_^), there is no need to a fancy way of backing up those files. But it is really annoying to re-rip 500GB of data .

Thanks in advance for any suggestions!

You didn't ask this question, but if you decide to buy several smaller drives, do three things.

First, of course, go for quality rather than inexpensivicitude. (I'll leave it to you to decide which brands are best.)

Second, spread your purchases out among the good brands. Buy one of each. That way, you're less likely to get stuck with two drives from the same bad batch.

Third, buy twice as many drives and make backups.

Hope this helps.

Hmm, there's no 4.x limit to FAT32... I have an 80GB FAT32 partition, that I keep my music on.
If you want to be able to use it on a machine running windows as well, then this is the only option (or an ext3 and always keep a copy of the program that makes it readable from windows).
Disadvantages of FAT32: no permissions, not journalised FS (can get corrupted easier), and it will get fragmented in a while...

If you want it just for back-ups, why don't you use DVD's? It's easier...

From the sounds of it, that would take a lot of DVD's. I know for me personally,it would take about 17-18 disks. Not very practical.

I had 2 spare 80gig Western Digital drives, and bought a couple of those enclosures that are becoming the rage nowdays. Actually just today, I filled up the first 80gig drive. I plan on springing for a 500 or 750gig drive when I catch one on sale, and just putting it in an enclosure.

For what its worth, I formatted mine in ext3, because I don't need to worry about sharing with a Windows PC.

IGF

Thanks all for the replies. I think I will go with wjevans_7d1@yahoo.co suggestion.

@Valkyrie_of_valhalla
I am pretty sure you can't have files very large in FAT32. According to wikipedia:

"The maximum possible size for a file on a FAT32 volume is 4 GiB minus 1 Byte"

And if you actually meant the size of the whole HD (I was referring to file-size), I think the limit is 120GB. Again, according to wikipedia:

"the FAT structure is not allowed to grow beyond 4,177,920 (< 222) clusters, placing the volume limit at 127.53 gigabytes"

And IndyGunFreak was right. Playing movies from the DVD's is way too much work. It is just so much easier to click on a file and start watching it, be either from any PC at home or from my Xbox. DVD's really won't work for me.

I think I will check a little about EXT2. I guess this could also be an alternative, if it does not have those FAT32 limitations...

Windows can read Ext2/3 if you download the driver from SourceForge.

So go for Ext3, if the UNIX machines can read it.

Oh, and FAT32 could go up to 160GiB, but why the hell bother with it in the first place?

750GiB drives are a bit of a ripoff. Same thing for the 1TiB drive by Samsumg. (Or was it Hitachi?)

My advice? Go for a few 320GiB drives, unless the 400GiB+ drives are more cost-effective. Try and calculate how much space you need, because you don't want 640GiB+ of space with only 80GiB's worth of data.

EDIT: Oh, no wait, stupid Joro, these are USB/IEEE1394 drives! Not ATA/SATA... ignore that unless you're willing to figure out how to turn an internal drive into a USB/FireWire one.

Sorry, I misread the statement. I thought it was refering to the maximum partition size, not the maximum size for a single file ( I gotta stop posting when I'm too sleepy). I guess you're right.

Hi again!

Thanks all for the suggestions. I started by buying one USB HD. I wanted to see how fast they were and how silent they ran. I got a Western Digital 250GB. These are the disks that I never had problems with (yet). My favorite, however, is perhaps Samsung disks: always very quiet from my personal experience.

The disk came with FAT32 and packed a few google applications, such as Picasa and google Search, which is a pretty neat move. I never thought that partition of type FAT32 could be bigger than 120GB, but I was wrong. So I am sticking with FAT32 for now, since it should not give me any problems with any Operating system. It defrags like hell, but there are also plenty of tools to help with that. So until FAT32 gives me trouble, I will be using it.

Next disk will be a 300GB Samsung . That will allow me some space to backup most of my files, I suppose.

Regards!

FYI the max FAT32 partition can be 8TiB.

Oh my . Thanks michaelk!. I wonder were I read about max size for FAT32. Perhaps those 120xGB was OS related? Hmmmm, let me google search it

I've had a lot of good experiences with ReiserFS. It seems more stable than ext3 by any means.

I like ReiserFS as well. It seems much faster for me in many cases. However, I highly doubt that would be a good FS to use on USB HD's intended to be used with different Operating Systems.

In the history of PCs there were many hard drive size limitations but most were due to BIOS or hardware (504mb, 2.1GB, 8GB, 32GB etc). The ATA standard until version 6 did have a drive limitation of 128GB.

Edit: After some additional searching indeed win98 did have a 128GB FAT32 filesystem limitation but only due to the fact that the drive utilities were 16bit.

There isn't any such thing as a USB/1394 drive, when you buy those prepackaged USB/1394 drive your getting an ATA/SATA drive plugged into a USB/1394 adapter so all the ATA/SATA limitations apply.
Its better in the long run to buy the USB enclosures/adapters yourself then buy the brand/model drive you prefer and stick it in. That way you know the full specs and not whatever drive was cheapest for the 'USB drive' maker to get at the time.
You can get USB enclosuers for under $20 each if you shop around.