On Sun, Mar 07, 2010 at 06:50:12PM +0000, Russell Gadd wrote: > I've been using Vfat for data partitions which I can access from both Linux > and Windows (multibooted). Recently I added another hard drive formatted > NTFS and have had no trouble getting Lenny to use it. > > I am wondering now whether to convert my Vfat partitions to NTFS as there > are some advantages. For example I recently forgot about the 4GB file > restriction of Vfat when trying to download a DVD iso - it got to 4GB then > gave up so I had to redownload again to the NTFS volume. I suspect NTFS is > more reliable at least in Windows. Are there any potential issues in Linux - > e.g. reliability / speed. > > Should I go NTFS now for my data files? (keeping the main Lenny root > filesystem on an ext3 partition). Just my experience but: 1) VFAT is a terrible filesystem with all sorts of restrictions, not least filesize and encoding issues. 2) NTFS (using ntfs-3g) performs terribly on Linux. The FUSE driver is slow, and this makes data transfer a very lengthy affair. No idea about reliability, but I think it's better than it was and I've not run into issues myself. Note that there's a third option: EXT2. Ext2 obviously works very well on Linux. Using the EXT2IFS driver for Windows, you can use Ext2/3 filesystems on Windows as well. http://www.fs-driver.org/ The main restrictions are that you need to format the filesystem with a 128 byte inode size, and you can't use an ext3 journal (but you can use it as ext3 in Linux). It also ignores the ownership/permissions and gives you access to everything. I formatted like this: mkfs -t ext3 -v -I 128 -j -L disklabel -m 0 -O sparse_super -O dir_index -O filetype -O large_file /dev/sdxn and I can now use a filesytem without filesize limitations, encoding issues, performance issues etc. on both Linux and Windows. I use this on a 500GB RAID1 array connected via FireWire 800, and it's *fast*. With ntfs-3g, it crawled due to maxing out my CPU. Regards, Roger -- .''`. Roger Leigh : :' : Debian GNU/Linux http://people.debian.org/~rleigh/ `. `' Printing on GNU/Linux? http://gutenprint.sourceforge.net/ `- GPG Public Key: 0x25BFB848 Please GPG sign your mail.
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