I've just added a new 160 GB harddrive and i was wondering what is the best format, for the other drive's i used fat32 because they they needed to be Windows compatible but in the last few months i've only used windows for a couple of times so that the compatibility isn't important anymore.
I'm using Mandrake linux 10.0 with the 2.6.7.sds kernel and i have about a hundred different format options, what is the best for a big harddrive, the standard option is "Journalised FS: ext3"

THX

I would use reiserfs with lvm.

I've just narrowed my options, if i want to make it one big partition (160GB) there are only a few options left
Linux Native
Journalised FS: ext3
Journalised FS: ReiserFS
Journalised FS: jFS
Journalised FS: xFS
fat16
fat32

I would go with XFS because it has fast writes and reads. I use it for almost every partition except for /boot, /var, and /home, but I'm thinking of converting my /home directory to XFS. You can adjust XFS settings to suit your system.

If you are thinking of using LVM (Logical Volume Management), you should go with ReiserFS because it is a little easier to resize it using its resize option. XFS does not have resize feature.

EXT3 is out of the question because it lousy when it comes to big hard drives. EXT2 the same filesystem as EXT3 but without a journal. EXT3 is a hybrid filesystem.

JFS is to messy. It gets fragmented and it does not have any defragging utilities, so you have to resort to copying the files to another medium and then back to defrag it.

FAT16 should not be thought of because it can only format up to two gigabytes. You would have to make 80 partitions.

FAT32 can be used but it creates a lot of wasted space. A file will take up 32 kilobytes. if you have a 1 kilobyte file, it will still take up 32 Kilobytes.

Electro, what do you use for /var and why?

For /var, I use ReiserFS for now. I'm thinking of formatting it as JFS because my /var partition is near the front of the drive and it is small (256 MB). ReiserFS is ok, but it truncates, defrags, sets accessing times, etc. This can slow down /var where all the logs are written to.

I have all of my Linux partitions as ReiserFS. What I would like to do sometime is reformat the partitions from whichever version they are now (3.x) to ReiserFS4, but that might be in a little bit. I'll just have to make sure that I have enough space on my root partition to hold everything from my home partition as well!
here's my setup for Linux:
hde1 - swap - Linux Swap - 1GB
hde2 - /var - ReiserFS - 500MB (Just in case something decides it wants to go crazy while it's logging and so that my system doesn't crash. Forgot where I read it, but the advice is mostly for servers, but I'm running Apache as well as other services that like to log, so it's not such a bad idea for myself)
hde3 - / - ReiserFS - 10GB
hde4 - /home - ReiserFS - ~28.5GB, whatever's left over from the 40GB hard drive.

I would choose ReiserFS because it's simply solid. It's fast and is the main competitor against what will be Longhorn's filesystem (Hmm, I'm guessing it'll be a new version of NTFS, but faster.... We'll see....) Plus, ReiserFS is essentially the best of all worlds for the demands for computer users. It's a balanced structure, is fast, and I havn't had any problems with corruption at all

Electro, thanks...makes sense