Best filesystem to format a slave HD
 

HI guys!!
I running Ubuntu 7.04 installed in a 160GB master hard Drive, and then I have an old 80gb HD with an older ubuntu version which I deleted the entire partition and added as a slave.
Now I want to use this slave 80GB HD strictly for storage, for backup my home folder, music file, photos, videos etc. this system will be just to run Linux, (I don't want to know anything about Windo$)
I just want to know what filesystem is best for this slave , I'm using Gparted and the default file system is Ext3, but I have this options too, Ext2, Fat16, Fat32, and reiserfs, I want to use this 80gb a s a big chunk of a drive, no partition, just a big One. After formatting this drive will I be able to access the drive if I format and install a new version of Ubuntu on the master drive? Also how can I add an Icon to my desktop that will open or mount this slave drive and write on it? same as I do with my flash drive.
Thanks for any advice
desktop:~$ sudo fdisk -l

Disk /dev/hda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes

255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders

Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System

/dev/hda1 * 1 19080 153260068+ 83 Linux

/dev/hda2 19081 19457 3028252+ 5 Extended

/dev/hda5 19081 19457 3028221 82 Linux swap / Solaris

Disk /dev/hdb: 81.9 GB, 81964302336 bytes

16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 158816 cylinders

Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 = 516096 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System

I would go with ext3 if I were you. It is an extremely stable, tried and true file system. Since you won't use Windows, FAT32 and FAT16 don't even need to be considered. ReiserFS is good too, but there are some issues that you might consider before using that one. When I used Reiser, I've noticed some speed improvement on the overall performance of my computer, but that was many years ago and I didn't have a good PC back then either.

Some distributions, such as SuSE dropped ReiserFS as their default file system, while others still defaults to ReiserFS (Slackware does, if my memory serves me right).

Oh well, long story short, go with ext3 :)

You will need at least on partition, which could take up the entire hard drive.

Ext3 would be fine to use as the filesystem for your second 80GB drive. It is the native linux filesystem.

If your first hard drive has a /boot partition, you might consider creating two partitions. The first one being a small /boot partition. You could backup all of the files in /boot and even make it bootable, e.g. use grub-install to write the mbr to this disk, even though this wouldn't be the partition that grub boots up with. If there were a problem with your main disk's MBR, you could still boot up from the bios's quick boot menu by selecting this disk to boot from.

Thanks guys I'll go with Ext3, another question, my brother always send me photos of his family attached an a e-mail, how can I download'em directly to the slave drive?

depends on what program you use, there should be a setting somewhere in the program, for example in firefox you would go edit>preferences and I think its on the first page