What HDD format to use for shared drive

[Maccer101]

Yeah, I booted up ubuntu from the CD and it could read my windows docs on the NTFS HDD, so thats cool.

thanks all

[my-planet]

Just wanted to add that I always use FAT32 and I run XP,Vista, Ubuntu, Solaris (sparc and x86) and Mac OSX. If formatting under Windows use this: ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/index.htm?fat32format.htm to format 'large' drives.

[peterb]

Duplicate post - deleted.

[peterb]

Just wanted to add that I always use FAT32 and I run XP,Vista, Ubuntu, Solaris (sparc and x86) and Mac OSX. If formatting under Windows use this: ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/index.htm?fat32format.htm to format 'large' drives.

I'm sure you must have a good reason (the Mac perhaps - but I think the Mac can read the NT file system) but really as a file system, FAT has many deficiencies. A file system such as NTFS (Windows) ext3 (Linux) HFS+ (Mac) offer many more advantages, including permissions and journalling. While FAT is fine for flash drives that need to be portable/cross platform, that is probably the only mainstream use.

[my-planet]

I'm sure you must have a good reason (the Mac perhaps - but I think the Mac can read the NT file system) but really as a file system, FAT has many deficiencies. A file system such as NTFS (Windows) ext3 (Linux) HFS+ (Mac) offer many more advantages, including permissions and journalling. While FAT is fine for flash drives that need to be portable/cross platform, that is probably the only mainstream use.

Agreed - all that has already been discussed in some detail here already, but the fact still remains that only FAT32 will work with all these OSs out of the box. For me, the main downside for FAT32 is the 4GB file limit.

[Lourdes]

OSX is just fine with NTFS as is everything else.

[aidanjt]

NTFS works on all 3 of the major platforms out of the box (FUSE support is being added to the BSDs too iirc, so they too, will support it), FAT32 is only used on external media because more small devices with limited space only uses FAT* for native storage.

[my-planet]

OSX is just fine with NTFS as is everything else.

...apart from Solaris. Also, I run Mac OSX leapard on a G4 Mac, and it cannot write to my NTFS drives.

However Mac FUSE (thanks aidanjt) looks interesting. I will check that out.

[2Cold Scorpio]

While my experience with Linux is quite limited, I'd say it'd make sense to just use NTFS, since both Windows and Linux can make use of it. ^_^

[Lourdes]

...apart from Solaris. Also, I run Mac OSX leapard on a G4 Mac, and it cannot write to my NTFS drives.

However Mac FUSE (thanks aidanjt) looks interesting. I will check that out.

Evidently you're doing something wrong. I use NTFS-3G on Solaris and OSX without issue.

[my-planet]

Evidently you're doing something wrong. I use NTFS-3G on Solaris and OSX without issue.

Oops - my apologies. I meant that to be Tiger, and not Leopard (the older one). And I'm not doing anything 'wrong' - I'm just not in a position where I can be compiling and adding stuff like NTFS-3G to solaris.