need better solution than FAT32 home server
 

I have a FAT32 formatted 1 TB IDE RAID 0 drive set up (2x500GB) in my Ubuntu 7.10 home server (used mainly for media storage and streaming). the problem is you can't set individual permissions on files and folders stored on a mounted FAT32 drive (you can only set permissions on the drive itself) and the 4 GB file size limit is becoming a real pain.

The main reason why I even formatted the drive as FAT32 was just in case I wanted or needed to move the drive back to a Windows computer and I didn't [and still don't] know how well ext3 is supported (in terms of reading and writing to a ext3 drive itself) under Windows.

So, either way I need to move away from FAT32 because of the limitations mentioned above. Will ext3 solve those issues and is reading and writing to a ext3 drive stable and reliable under Windows (just in case)? Or do I need to look at another format altogether?

TIA

P.S. - no NTFS please

No NTFS

No ext3

You don't really leave a lot of options do you?

Can you explain why you don't want NTFS given that it is natively supported under Windows and supported via Samba under Linux?

Windoze only knows about FAT32 & NTFS so if you require Windoze compatibility that's what you need.

Alternatively you could install Cygwin on the Windoze OS to make it recognize things Linux such as ext3. That seems a lot of work though.

There is a program that gives you ext3 support in Windows. I don't know where it is, but I'm sure a google search would give it to you.

Brandon

+1 for @jlightner - ntfs is the way to go.
I tried an IFS for ext3 on Windoze a couple of years back - wasn't very happy with it. Things move on - other people seem happy with what is now available. I stick to ntfs.

or via NTFS-3G
Or in this way

I agree. The ntfs-3g driver enables full access to ntfs on Linux. I think you still need Windows to format the partition though.

There are at least two programs that support transparent usage of ext3 on WinXP, but I never used them personally and I remember people recommended to never use them. Google it, if your interested.

I think, NTFS is your only option - Windows doesn't support anything else that might be useful. Forgetting about Windows and using any other available filesystem instead (ext2, ext3, reiserfs, xfs - whatever) is also a good way to solve problem.

Also, formatting 1TB drive in Fat32 was a really bad idea, because space will be wasted. See here or search for "FAT32 cluster size".

There is mkntfs command.

There is one major limitation of ntfs - you need Windoze to fix it. Currently only chkdsk will do the job if you have problems - not a issue for me as I need a Windows license for my work. The ntfsprogs teams are apparently looking to handle this as well in the future (hopefully without upsetting the 3g basket).

You do take regular backups ??? - I've never liked raid-0. No redundancy, and debatable performance gains - one day I might see what the disk level I/O is like on one.

my bad folks, i think u read me wrong (i know i wasn't exactly clear)

i want ext3 (or some similar powerful robust Linux file system)
i don't want FAT32 anymore
i don't want NTFS because Linux does not have native support for it (i'm not a fan of using 3rd party drivers/extensions/apps like ntfs-3g on a somewhat core component of an operation)

i don't care for/require Windows friendliness anymore at this very point. i realize Linux has been very good to me supporting this relatively foreign file system (FAT32) for a year now with no problems at all. i can confidently cut that chord. i imagine Linux will shine even more with a native file system.

so... for my 2 TB (I'm buying more storage) RAID 0 (I don't care about redundancy) storage and streaming drive in my Ubuntu 8.04 (i'll upgrade from 7.10) home linux server being shared via SMB/CIFS, AFP and maybe UPnP, which file system should I go with (ext2, ext3, reiserfs, xfs or etc.)??

I'd suggest ext3, simply because it has the widest linux support (if you had to boot a rescue disk etc.)

ext3 for me too. I've used several file system formats. I can't find any performance difference between the journaling file systems and ext3 is mature on Linux.

so with a secondary hard drive formatted as ext3 I can still set permissions on its individual files and folders just like on the boot hard drive?

also what is the file size limit on ext3? does it have problems dealing with 6+ GB sized files?

Yes, and I'm according to this http://www.novell.com/documentation/...ml/apas04.html, up to 2TB, but this is for a 2.4 kernerl, so it must be at least as gret under 2.6

Better have a read of this.

Consider XFS or JFS. Look at the sunit/su and swidth/sw options for mkfs.xfs. JFS will make you happy you chose it the first time you have to run fsck on your array.