Re: Vfat or NTFS?

[Sebastian Weisgerber <sebastian.weisgerber@dystopianfuture.de>]

The 4 Gig max filesize of vfat makes it unusable for me.

I used ntfs-3g for more than a year on 4 different HDD, all around 1 TB and had no 
problems with stability, data loss or any problems at all.
Performance is ok, but not very fast.
I got rates of max. 15 MByte/s on Encrypted USB 2.0 Truecrypt HDDs.

An Windows ext2/ext3 is also an alternative: http://www.fs-driver.org/
But there are some limitations. Check their FAQ.

I would the the fuse ntfs-3g driver, so you don't have to alter your windows installation 
and it is usable at a friend's windows pc.

One problem I encountered with ntfs-3g is that it consumes 99% CPU and the transfer rate 
drops below 1 MByte if you got only 10% space left and the data is fragmented.
Keep that in mind.

One contra for ext3 is that is uses 10+ GByte more space for the filesystem and journal 
(on 1 TB Drives).

Sebastian



On Sunday 07 March 2010 19:50:12 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).