I’ve always thought that NTFS was the “better” of the two formats, especially when you’re using Windows Xp. I just picked up an external hard drive, and it’s pre-formatted FAT32. I’m mainly going to be using the drive as a little mp3-streaming box - does that make a difference?
NTFS is better in several ways (better economy of disk usage, more fault tolerant, more flexible on file and overall volume size), but FAT32 is more widely compatible.
If you’re only planning to use it on computers that you personally own, and you know they fully support NTFS, then I’d reformat it as that.
Plus, if you want to put big (4Gb+) files on it, NTFS is a must.
What do I want 4Gb+ files for - DVD video, Virtual Machine hard drives, DVD ISOs
I have a smaller FAT32 partition for fussy systems, and mostly use NTFS.
Si
Also, Linux and I believe Mac OS X have problems reading NTFS, so if you are going to use the drive in a multi-OS setup, FAT32 is better. Lowest Common Denominator and all that. Yes, I realise that makes use of large files more difficult.
Yeah, I bought an external drive last week, and started copying stuff to it without checking, and it errored on an 8gig DVD-DL image, since it was FAT32.
I had to copy everything back, reformat to NTFS, and copy everything back. Bit of a pain.
I plan on getting a wireless router at some point, and attach the drive to it, so I’m either going to have to reformat it back to FAT32, or hopefully I can find a router that supports NTFS.
What does a router have to do with your hard disk format? And how do they “support” one type or another?
Some newer routers have USB ports so you can attach external drives to them, then anything in the network can access the drive. A coworker of mine has one, not sure what model, and he mentioned it does not support NTFS.
Ah! Network drives – I hadn’t thought of that, and it confused me for a minute there.
In my (admittedly rather limited) experience, Linux will read NTFS just fine. It’s when you want to write to NTFS using Linux that you run into problems. And even that problem has apparently been circumvented to a considerable extent, although there seems to be some debate among the experts regarding how well it actually works, and whether it can cause other problems for a Linux system.
Well, the more wrong I am about that statement, the happier I’ll be about it. 
If OS X can handle NTFS, both read and write, so much the better. I have a 300-gig NTFS drive full of data from my fried computer, that I want to put into an external-drive case and use from my new MacBook Pro. I hope that’s doable. I may have to get a second FAT drive and do a copy and from the first to the second drive. Is it doable as network-attached storage?
(Router with USB/Firewire external-drive port? Intriguing.)
This information comes too late, but in Win2K and up you can use convert.exe to change from FAT32 to NTFS without losing data. It’s going back to FAT32 that is the hard part.
Do’h! I’ll know for next time though, thanks!
That’s what I thought - actually, it’s kinda obvious in hindsight - these routers typically have a proper embedded OS - no reason why they shouldn’t be able to work with USB peripherals.
Does anyone know if they can format the device themselves, through the control panel? If so, it might be possible to get them to use a different file system altogether such as ext3 (although the drive wouldn’t then work when plugged into a Windows machine)
Some of these - for example the Linksys NSLU (called the slug) - have a whole community dedicated to hacking/updating the firmware to do whatever you like. In many cases, a whole Linux OS can be installed, albeit with limited RAM and CPU capability. Sometimes, people push the devices way too far.
Once you are sharing the files via smb/cifs, the underlying file system does not matter. However, some of the usb network file servers use nonstandard protocols, and some cannot be modified in any way.
If you want to try - check out the hardware first. Certainly the NSLU is extremely modifiable. I have not looked at any others.
And you can read ext3 devices on Windows, just not easily. It would be a great addition to the core OS, though.
As for NTFS on Linux - Read/Write is possible, but interoperabilty is still dodgy. The Linux NTFS-3G drivers are VERY conservative - if there is any risk to data, it stops. So I often find that I cannot mount NTFS volumes because XP has left it in a dirty state, and NTFS-3G just refuses to touch it until I have chkdsked it to leave it clean. Pretty frustrating, so I have a FAT32 partition for shared data on my laptop (mp3s and photos).
Si
OS X can read NTFS just fine, but it does not write, in my experience.
complete ignoramus here
Why is it so difficult for someone to write a driver for linux or OS X to read write NTFS?
possible WAGs: very low level commands, conflicts with existing drivers, hardware dependent
just curious
Microsoft considers the details of NTFS a trade secret, and has not released any documentation describing how it works.
People have managed to reverse-engineer enough of it to allow reading NTFS volumes in non-Microsoft operating systems, but not safely write to them.
Take this for what it’s worth: some mysterious problem caused my 60GB primary NTFS partition, which has Windows XP and boots and all, to become unreadable last week. I couldn’t read the partition in any Windows computer – it would just click and eventually say “The disk is not formatted – format now?”
I thought for sure all my data was lost forever, which was Bad because all my school stuff is on the partition and because my stupid external 500GB WD drive that I use for backup also just crapped out.
But I was able to read it just fine using my Knoppix 4.01 boot CD, and when I upgraded to Knoppix 5.1, I was able to write to another NTFS partition as well, and copy all my data over safely. Whew!
Yep. This is one of the plus sides of reverse engineering something undocumented - because you are not sure about anything, you write code to skip past the bits you don’t yet understand (including fatal errors), and keep handling the stuff you do. Windows just hits the error and halts, not knowing where to go next. The same applies to OpenOffice Word Document handling - in many cases, it can read a corrupt Word document that Word itself will not read.
You were able to create, mount and write to a NTFS partition safely because it was all happening within Linux - once you try to use a NTFS partition across both Windows and Linux you may get issues (mostly with windows leaving things dirty and Linux being conservative). Also, NTFS-3G ( the NTFS driver for Linux) does not attempt to maintain user permissions - an issue if you use user accounts on XP, as all new files end up owned by the first account on the system (usually the administrator).
Si