Best Filesystem for 1TB external with cross platform support?

Hey all. I have a 1 TB hard drive that i currently have formatted NTFS and i was wondering if there are any other decent file systems I can use to format it that would be supported under Windows, *Nix, and OS X. I was thinking about Fat32 but apparently windows doesn't allow me to do this. I haven't had much luck with NTFS. I tried to write some files to it on my Ubuntu box but they would never show up unless I was viewing my drive on that computer. If I tried to view them on a windows machine It would just tell me that that directory was unavailable. I can't write to the drive at all under Mac OS X.

Is there a problem with using FAT32 on a drive this large? Does anyone know of anything else that i could use and still maintain cross platform support?

Thanks for any input.

i always thought that fat 32 was not able to write a file system to a disk that big, but my 1TB external drive came formatted in fat32.

maybe try formatting it under ubuntu.

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Originally Posted by luciusad2004

I tried to write some files to it on my Ubuntu box but they would never show up unless I was viewing my drive on that computer. If I tried to view them on a windows machine It would just tell me that that directory was unavailable.

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I've seen this happen before, and the problem then was that either it was not gracefully disconnected from a Windows system or it was disconnected from a Linux system without unmounting it first. NTFS support in *nix is still a bit shaky, so you have to baby it more than FAT32 or EXT*.

As for the initial question, really, there's not a good answer. FAT32 theoretically has a volume limit of 2TB, but Windows won't let you format a partition larger than, iirc, ~32GB as FAT32 so you'd have to format it in Linux. You also can't have a file larger than 4GB in FAT32, which can become a problem with modern stuff. Your only other real option is to use EXT3, which has native support in Linux and OS X, and install this on any windows systems you want to access it on.
http://www.fs-driver.org/

You could also just continue using NTFS, but you'd have to use something like this to get NTFS support on OS X.
http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/

It was definitely not gracefully disconnected from my windows system, Ever. My safely remove hardware thingy never works under XP on my laptop. Whenever I try to eject anything, be it hard drive, flash drive, or whatever. I get an error stating that the device couldn't be ejected at that time because it was still "In use" even though it was doing absolutely nothing. I'm also unsure if I unmounted it before removing it from linux. It was a while ago. The files in question were around 60 GB total and i don't remember if it froze up towards the end or not.

I've also had strange problems with it when using it on computers at work. I would be transfering files and start getting an error that I either A)don't have write permisions or B) the drive is full. I've only filled myabe 150GBs so I was pretty baffled. It seems to work fine on my laptop at home but I haven't been using it at home much to test it out.

I primarily use it to back up my own data so that I can transfer it between my various computers. I currently run Ubunut on my desktop and XP on my laptop and I would like to add a Macbook Pro to my collection so i really was looking for cross platform compatibility. But I also occasionally use it to share files with my coworkers. What I'm thinking is this:

I could probably have perhaps a 20GB partition of NTFS for sharing large files with my coworkers and then do the rest of the Harddrive in EXT* to use on my own computers.

Do you know how well the FS-Drivers work under windows? Does EXT3 have any benefits over Fat32?

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Originally Posted by luciusad2004

Do you know how well the FS-Drivers work under windows?

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It works quite well, though it doesn't like it if you have lots of weird drive mappings...gets confused... But for your use case, it'll work fine.

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Originally Posted by luciusad2004

Does EXT3 have any benefits over Fat32?

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Short answer, yes.

Long answer, in terms of limitations:

File size limit:
FAT32 : 4GiB
ext3 : 2 TiB

Partition size limit:
FAT32 : 2TiB
ext3 : 32TiB

ext3 is also a journaling file system, which for the end-user basically means it never gets fragmented.

For more information on the differences, check out our good friend, Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAT32#FAT32
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext3

I use NTFS drives on Linux all the time and never had a problem. There are tons of warnings out there if you mount an NTFS read/write on a *nix system, but I can say from my experience I have had no problems. Of course your mileage may very.

As for the Mac, most of my friends that have them use nfts-3g which is the same driver I use in linux.

http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/24481/ntfs-3g

and they say it works for them.