Large Raid data disk, share between windows and linux

[NeoCORE]

Hey all,

Santa was very kind to me this year and brought me a nice piece of kit =D

Using a DFI Lanparty UT 250GB with raid to stripe 2x250GB disks (combined around 1/2 a terabyte).

Basically for years, I have wanted to avoid moving files between partitions (roll on ZFS!) but, now that I have my wish, I don't know how I can share such a large partition safely between systems.

Windows = Fat32 - yuch, but looks like best bet.... though can you imagine a disk check on a 1/2tb disk in fat?
NTFS - nice... but not the best

Linux = large array of great filesystems... but only 1 (ext2 which may as wll be fat32 in this case) has semi decent write support in windows.

Any1 have any ideas? or am I doomed to fat-dom?
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[YetiChick]

Well...

You could go the commercial route:

http://www.ntfs-linux.com/

or the (sorta) free route:

http://www.jankratochvil.net/project/captive/

It's also possible to use a read-only driver on each OS as a kind of workaround. Perhaps read-only NTFS on the Linux side and read-only ext3 on the Windows side. Something like http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/explore2fs.htm in Windows maybe...

My old approach:

There simply is not a decent high-capacity filesystem which is fully, natively read-write in both Linux and Windows. After pondering this fact for a while, I came to the conclusion that it was rare that I would run into a file that both OSes needed write access to. Oh, sure, it would have been convenient to be able to tag my MP3 collection from either OS, but it was far from necessary. Also, since NTFS would read quite nicely from Linux, the only real problem was getting files from Linux to Windows.

Soooo... I made myself a nice 10G FAT32 partition. If the need to create a file in one Linux which must be available in Windows ever arose, I could just drop it on that partition as a holding area. The hold partition could have been much smaller 99% of the time, but I occasionally would need to move a DVD ISO.

I have since drifted away from multi-boot. I keep a single high-end Windows XP machine for gaming and certain other Win-specific tasks which are best suited to a power machine. My other computers are all running whatever OS is best for their purpose, with VMWare used for the odd exception.