up vote 1 down vote favorite
share [g+] share [fb]

I have a 2TB Seagate GoFlex Desk External HDD. I want to format it. Which is the best disk format, which will be supported in all OS, like Windows, Linux and Mac?

link|improve this question
feedback

2 Answers

up vote 3 down vote accepted

I've found NTFS, sadly, the be the "most" portable.

In most cases you'll at least be able to read ntfs without OS modifications.

For write support in Linux, you may need to install ntfs-3g.

For write support in OSX, you should consider installing MacFuse with a NTFS driver.

EXT2/3 Alternatively

You could use something like ext3 which anything calling itself a unix derivative should support quite well. You can install this to get support in Windows. That driver will only mount the ext3 file system as an ext2, which will work, but disables file system journaling, meaning you'd have to do some scanning/fixing if you crash the file system or uncleanly mount it in some way.

OSX supports ext3 out of the box (which it should, being a unix system). But you may have problems with Finder automounting it, probably depends on the version of OSX. Look here for some mounting tips, if necessary.

File Server, if you don't care about the external drive part

If you want to use that drive to store massive amounts of data for various machines, you may want to considering running a file server for it. Some people get all whiney about incurring extra power costs, so you can consider that, though if you do it well the cost won't be a lot.

You could find a computer to toss the drive in, set it up with FreeNAS and provide access to your drive over your network using the samba/cifs file sharing protocol - which all major OSes support very well.

link|improve this answer
feedback
up vote 0 down vote

FAT 32 is by far the most supported out of the box, but will not support a 1 tb partition .

link|improve this answer
2  
Indeed it won't. It also has a maximum file size of 2GB. And since it's not journaled, it's prone to file system corruption when it's uncleanly unmounted - though by not logging fs transactions, it's probably 'faster' than ntfs/ext3 - but only if you never cause it to need to be scanned/repaired by crashing your machine or something, else scanning everything and fixing it kind of ruins that performance benefit.. I think we can safely say fat32 is no longer a viable option for desktop computing. – Doc Jun 30 '11 at 19:16
@The White Phoenix And yet we still use it by default on both SD cards and flash drives... Unfortunately, journals tend to choke even a 4G flash drive in terms of capacity. – new123456 Jul 1 '11 at 1:53
Yup, it is portable - though in the context of this question, I think it's not really an option due to its limitations in partition and file size more than anything. – Doc Jul 4 '11 at 15:11
feedback

Your Answer

 
or
required, but never shown
discard

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.