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Format for external drive

Submitted by IceCap on December 2, 2007 - 5:37am. Other Computers

I just got myself an external backup drive (a 650GB Seagate and a Metal Gear Firewire/USB external case) supplementing the two internal drives in my Quicksilver 2002. The question I have is what format should I go with? I might want to access the drive (for backup) from a Linux machine and maybe (this is a large maybe) from a Windows machine. So i figure my options are NTFS, HFS+, or one of those Linux formats (I can't remember what they are called).
Thanks

IC

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ext2 and ext3

Submitted by vieuxnez on December 2, 2007 - 2:55pm.

are two linux formats, FWIW

» Dustin

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Dr. Webster's picture

OS X only has rudimentary NTF

Submitted by Dr. Webster on December 2, 2007 - 3:16pm.

OS X only has rudimentary NTFS support, and IIRC can't write to drives formatted as such. If you want to be able to use it in Windows, you'll need to go FAT32 (which OS X can read/write just fine). There are, of course, the inherent filesystem limitations (maximum of 2GB files, etc.), but it's the simplest way to get it done.

» Applefritter Admin
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Yeah, just found out

Submitted by IceCap on December 3, 2007 - 12:11am.

Couldn't copy my pictures over to the drive formatted as NTFS (from Seagate). So I just formatted it as HFS Extended (Journaled). I'll install the HFS utilities on the Linux machine and I think they also exists for Windows, but that is a minor issue.

Thanks

IC

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Jon's picture

The journaling may or may not

Submitted by Jon on December 3, 2007 - 1:24am.

The journaling may or may not cause trouble on Linux. I haven't kept up on the HFS+ support, but I know a couple years ago it was recommended to turn it off if you were going to use GPartEd in Linux to resize and HFS+ partition. I don't know if there was any effect on r/w of files.

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