File System choice for External USB drive

[The Skillster]

Hey guys, I have a new 320 GB usb drive coming in tomorrow, normally I would format in NTFS (maybe have a couple of NTFS and a single FAT32 partition), but since I usually copy stuff for my friend who has a mac and I have a linux file server I would like some recommendations on how to set up the drive.

Does FAT32 have a partition size limit? Can makes read linux partitions?

[sfx1999]

FAT32 would be your best bet; I don't think Linux can write to NTFS.

Its size limit is 2048GB. The problem you might have, though, is that its maxium file size is 4GB.

[Sukaeto]

I'm not sure about the Mac, but I think because it's based on BSD it should read FAT32.

Now, if you're not planning on hooking it up to either the Linux box OR the Mac directly, both of them will be able to read from/write to it via the SMB protocol (albiet slowly.)

All of that aside, I would recommend FAT32 *anyway* (unless you require the security), because NTFS is just *SLOW*.  The only downside to FAT32 on a drive that large is its cluster sizes - probably somewhere around 32k.  However, if you're not storing alot of small files on the drive, that probably won't be a problem for you.

[Aaron]

I can confirm that the Mac can read and write FAT32 with no problem.  It also has read-only support for NTFS (OS X 10.3.5 and later).

I find NTFS to be more "resilient" (errors don't crop up as often), plus I like the compression feature (although its usefulness depends on what kind of data you're dealing with), but for multi-platform support, FAT32 is the way to go.

[The Skillster]

FAT 32 partition it is, not sure about security though, and also fat32 gets errors easily

[The Skillster]

shame - the drive came ready formatted as FAT32, with drivers and alsorts on it already!
Its pretty nice usb drive called Western Digital My Book.
Pretty good perfomer and hasnt complained since i started throwing everything on to it.
Time to start working on my linux server..