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I have a 2TB Western Digital external USB drive that I formatted to FAT32. It takes a minute and 25 seconds for Windows to recognize it when I plug it in. I've tried multiple computers. It only takes around 14 seconds on Linux. It seems anything Microsoft has trouble with it. XBOX 360 behaves the same way, while Playstation 3 works fine. Maybe I should make two 1TB partitions? I'm not entirely sure, but I think the problem wasn't there before I formatted to FAT32.

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  • Which version of Windows are you using? I had some issues using external USB hard disks with Windows Vista, and those issues were solved after I upgraded to Windows 7.
    – Mantis
    Jul 6, 2011 at 21:04

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According to my experience, Operating system from Microsoft is one of the reason. It means, windows takes time to load FAT32 partition. Rather than this LINUX & OSX has powerful utilities to access such external disk. So, I just recommend you to use your external HardDisk with NTFS partitions.

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I wouldn't use FAT on partition that large. Linux can read and write NTFS fine nowadays, if you use ntfs3g driver, and there are applications on accessing EXT3 partitions in Windows.

So I would use NTFS, or possibly EXT3. NTFS offers smoother ride if you need to access the disk from both Windows and Linux while EXT3 is harder to break due to journaling.

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