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Old 10-12-2008, 08:59 AM   #1
DaBlade
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Question External hard drive file system?


Hello
I'm considering buying another external hard drive, but I have a bit of a problem:
I have a desktop running Debian (with WinXP on a secondary hard drive) and I have a MacBook Pro, running, well, Mac OSX.
I'd like the hard drive to be accessible to all of those systems..
My current external hard drive has Ext3, which works wonderfully on Debian, sometimes sort of works in Windows with Virtual Volumes/explore2fs, and doesn't work at all in Leopard.

Can anyone recommend a file system for a terabyte drive (that's likely to store huge files, such as HD videos), which can be accessed by all three major OSs?

It doesn't have to be a builtin one, but so long as it can be installed and used on all three, and is quick (ergo, no FUSE stuff), I'd be happy with it.
 
Old 10-13-2008, 03:19 AM   #2
clvic
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This question is of interest to me also... actually, I also have the same problem when dealing with much smaller disks and windows/linux only, as I'd like a modern filesystem that supports POSIX features (more than all, symbolic links, sparse files) and that can be accessed from many OSs.
FAT32 is not a good option because it lacks many features and results in very big clusters even with not-so-big disks... but it seems to be a de-facto standard. Will ZFS be natively supported by most OSs one day? That'd be the solution.

I still haven't found a solution to this problem now... sorry this post does not really help!
 
Old 10-13-2008, 04:18 AM   #3
Electro
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Using explore2fs is the old way and EXT2 IFS is the new way in Windows. This will get rid of using virtual volumes that may not work in Mac OS X. It will also get the saying "sometimes works" in Windows to always works. Then install ext2fsx for Mac OS X. From the logs for ex2fsx it is best to mount an EXT2 as read-only to minimize data corruption.

Another way is to setup a file server using a gigabit NIC and a gigabit network. I think either SAMBA or NFS can be used.
 
Old 10-13-2008, 04:26 PM   #4
DaBlade
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Electro: I tried installing ext2fsx, but it simply won't work.. I can't really explain why, it just doesn't.

Anyway, someone on IRC suggested NTFS.. Would this be quick, and, more importantly, stable?
 
Old 10-14-2008, 01:19 AM   #5
Electro
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Even though ntfs-3g states there are no data corruptions -- yet. ntfs-3g has not been tested for long term use and for very, very big files. Though FAT32 can be used if files are not larger than 4 GB in size. The cluster size should not be able to provide too much slack space unless files are not divisible by the cluster size.

I suggest if you can not find a reliable file system for each OS, setting up a file server to host the files will be your only choice.
 
Old 10-14-2008, 02:28 AM   #6
DaBlade
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Hmm.. I don't really know.. I'd like to be able to use the drive directly on all of the computers, but I guess if that's gonna be a problem.. :/
And I will undoubtably have files way larger than 4GB, so FAT32 is out
 
Old 10-14-2008, 02:36 AM   #7
FredGSanford
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I use NTFS on my external hard drives, to use with all 3 major OSes. Linux, MacOSX & Windows...so far with large files, I haven't had any data corruptions.
 
Old 10-14-2008, 03:59 AM   #8
DaBlade
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I'll go for NTFS, then...

(I can't believe I'll actually voluntarily use NTFS. :P )
 
  


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