usb-storage: which filesystem?

tucolino · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 12 Jun 2003 Posts: 90

just got a maxtor extrenal usb drive. everything seems to be working quite well. 120 GB of storage can always come handy

my question is, what filesystem is everyone using with these drives? pros and cons? should i trust 120GB with vfat? I just made a small reiserfs partition, and it seemed to work great. i guess if one wants to use the drive on diferent platforms, then vfat is probably the way to go. i'd like to hear your opinions and your experiences.

thanks,

tuco
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d0nju4n · Posted: Thu May 20, 2004 6:45 pm Post subject:

my usb mass storage is a portable mp3 player @ 10gigs. I use vfat fot it, because I dont think the "os" for it will run under reiser or the like. Also, I transfer file with windows on it, so that kind of dictates vfat. If you dont have any of these types of situations, I would use whatever fs type you use on your box
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percking · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 03 Jul 2003 Posts: 90

my ads external firewire drive is partitioned into two partitions, ~30gb of ntfs and then ~80gb of ext3.

I transfer my miniDV tapes to my laptop and then use the external drive to carry them to my girlfriends pc. They can get big (more than 4gigs) so that ruled vfat out. I also need a windows usable partition to install larger programs cuz my 4 gb partition on the laptops hdd is pretty much full with the install. I've not had any troubles reading ntfs so far. I only delete things when i'm in windows or using the gf's pc.

I also found a program (Can't think of the name at the moment) that reads ext3 partitions in windows, not natively but through a program. At the time that was the only thing like it I could find that was stable enough, so thats why I went ext3.

Hope that helps
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Nate_S · Guru Joined: 18 Mar 2004 Posts: 414

I've formated my 256MB usb stick with 64 MB vfat in case I need to use it in windows (haven't yet,) and the rest of it is ext3, as I feel safer having a journeled filesystem, as it could get unplugged accidently.

tucolino · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 12 Jun 2003 Posts: 90

thanks everyone. i decided to partition the drive with 5GB vfat, 5GB reiserfs, and the rest reiserfs as well. I copied about 30GB to the drive by now. In two ocassions, copying has blocked , making the mounted directory unbrowsable. I cannot even kill the process or unmount the partition. I'm considering using ext3 instead. anyone had any problems with ext3 on one of these drives?

tuco
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http://www.xenodium.com/blog
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