Universal Hard drive fs stratagy

[xmorg]

I want to "upgrade" my 500gb external to support a filesystem that supports over four gigs.

Systems, 1 freebsd desktop, 2 linux laptops, misc windows systems.

I no longer have a macbook so mounting on a mac is not critical but it would be nice

There is ntfs but ive had issues with freebsd and ntfs

I was thinking about ex2/3fs, especially when I saw a windows driver for ext2 that supports ext3.

I was thinking about putting 1gb as fat32 with the "tools", to mount a modern file system.

Or i could just go ntfs and hope for the best...
Any ideas?

[Beastie]

Do you mean 4GB filesystems or 4GB files? FAT32 doesn't support files over 4GB.

The performance of NTFS is not that good. Besides, you don't really want to risk corrupting your data using non-Microsoft drivers.

What about using FreeBSD's UFS2 and making it available through Samba?

[joekiser]

NTFS for compatibility. You will have no problem accessing / writing to it from FreeBSD or Linux, and any performance benefits of faster filesystems are offset by the USB bottleneck.

[Beastie]

Originally Posted by joekiser

NTFS for compatibility. You will have no problem accessing / writing to it from FreeBSD or Linux

Stuff happens and then you end up with data loss and corruption.

If your files are mostly created under Windows (and stored on NTFS), then use FreeBSD's read-only NTFS driver.
If FreeBSD is your main OS (and you store your files on UFS2), then use a UFS driver on Windows to read the data.
Etc.

Using the network to share the disk is still the safest way.

Originally Posted by joekiser

and any performance benefits of faster filesystems are offset by the USB bottleneck.

No one is talking about SATA-like speed of course. There is USB-limit speed and then there is below USB-limit. I've used NTFS, FAT32 and UFS2 on the same external disk and NTFS was noticeably the slowest.