What is the best file system for external hard drives?

July 30, 2010 in best external hard drives | Comments (3)

At my work place I care a 250GB external hard drive with me, that has all the data that I and my co-worker use on it. This data is literly millons of files, it slows FAT32 down big time. But we use the two main OS’s (LINUX and Windows). so what is the best file system for this dirve? I was thinking reisfersFS, JFS, XFS. but I don’t know. all help will be wounderful.
how do you think ext2/3/4 would do for this?

If you use two different OSs like window sand linux to access the external hard drive, FAT or FAT32 is the best option. NTFS is only for windows and you can’t access it by linux.
Try doing a defrag on the external hard drive. Also depends on what kind of connection the external drive uses. Scsi or firewire may be fast.

3 Responses to “What is the best file system for external hard drives?”

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  1. Comment by gtopala — July 30, 2010 at 6:24 pm  

    Do you have aditional software for Windows to see "reisfersFS, JFS, XFS"? If you don’t you can use them.
    If you have NTFS support for your version of Linux, you should use use NTFS.
    References :

  2. Comment by came1toe_jones — July 30, 2010 at 6:33 pm  

    If you use two different OSs like window sand linux to access the external hard drive, FAT or FAT32 is the best option. NTFS is only for windows and you can’t access it by linux.
    Try doing a defrag on the external hard drive. Also depends on what kind of connection the external drive uses. Scsi or firewire may be fast.
    References :

  3. Comment by youwho — August 10, 2010 at 9:36 am  

    You can access ntfs with linux. I’m using Ubuntu Studio dual boot with Windows 7; to be honest I’ve never used the Windows OS at all; Ubuntu is too good ;-) . But re your comment: I can definitely access the ntfs volume from Ubuntu, it’s the other way around that doesn’t work: Windows can’t access ext.

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