[Wylug-help] External USB Disk

[Towle, William]

>= Jim
> On Wed, 28 Oct 2009, Smylers wrote:
> > Hi there.  I'm thinking of getting am external USB disk, 
> such as this
> > one from Buffalo with 1 Tb of storage for ?70:
> >
> >  http://www.cclonline.com/product-info.asp?product_id=33798
> >
> > When I get it, what filesystem should I use?
> >
> > Mostly I'll be using it with Linux, but it would be nice to have the
> > option of taking it elsewhere and connecting it to others' 
> computers,
> > including those running other operating systems.
> 
> It depends what your envisioned use is. Is it for showing pictures or 
> similar on other peoples machines? If so maybe partition it. Create a 
> FATwhatever partition for this use. Use another partition(s) 
> for linux 
> use backups etc? Always carry a linux bootable CD/USBstick 
> for those times
> you need to move files from linux to fat partition?

  I can definitely recommend the latter: all my SSDs are FAT and
ext2 partitioned, with GrUB as the boot loader and the Tiny Core
Linux kernel and initrd (only 10MB!) ready to give any machine
one or more sane shells as required.


> > Is Fat32 viable with such big disks?  Is Linux's NTFS 
> support any good
> > these days?
> >
> > Does using a Windows-compatible filesystem mean that a file 
> loses Unixy
> > things such as the execute flag when copied to the disk and 
> back again?

  Using a FAT partition will mean that in addition to loss of
ownership data, executable permissions are assumed for all
files by default due to lack of support for an equivalent flag.
Consequently, you may get unwanted permissions when copying
elsewhere with 'cp'. umsdos-fs went some way to addressing both
issues but AFAIK support for it got obsoleted during a rewrite
early in the 2.6 kernel series and hasn't come back. Normally I
'scp' files off the disks in question, so for me that isn't an
issue. One could also use tarballs to work around the limited
permissions.

  Other limitations of FAT on a drive of that size include not
being able to use Microsoft tools to format it (due to NTFS
being preferable for anything over 32GB), and there's a 4GB
[minus one byte] maximum file size. FAT is also a bit wasteful
on large disks (related note? I have an mp3 player with a 2GB
disk somewhere which wouldn't read the disk after it got
corrupted; reformatting didn't seem to help - but it turns out
the device would choke if the larger sector sizes needed to
partition the whole disk were used, and that this didn't
reflect what the manufacturer had originally done. Shrinking
the partition and filesystem in it by a few sectors fixed
this).


W.