What file system?

michellez

michellez

michellez

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This is a bit of a Windows and a bit of a Linux question. I suspect you Linux guys will be better at answering it though ;)

I've just got myself a lovely Asus eee 1000h with a 160GB Sata drive.

I've got Windows XP that it came with on it at the moment. Going to leave that on there "incase", it's not like I'm overly tight on hard drive space.

I'm going to put Ubuntu (eee edition as I don't have time to mess around at the moment, I just need it to work!) on it too though as the my main OS and upgrade the RAM to 2GB soon (might as well, costs next to nothing!).

My plan is:

Partition 1 = 20GB, NTFS, Windows XP
Partition 2 = 20GB, EXT3, Ubuntu eee
Partition 3 = 4 GB, Swap
Partition 4 = 116GB, ???, Data

Partition 4 is my query. What shall I use - FAT32, EXT3, or something else? I can see I can get EXT3 drivers for Windows from fs-driver.org so that's cool as I'll need to access the data partition in both OSs. It's just purely for data storage - music, photos, etc.

I'm looking at it now from the aspect of which is "lighter" in terms of CPU usage, hard drive access etc, and so then looking at when it's running on battery which would run it down less. Bit OTT and not really going to make a difference maybe, but I'm curious on wisdom you guys can share.

Thanks,
Shell
 
I would say EXT3 is better than FAT32 and if you can get XP to access EXT3 then there's no reason why not.

Might I suggest testing it first before putting any proper data on it... Easiest way to decide is to try both and see if one works better straight off.
 
Well if you need access from both you have two options...

EXT3 and find windows drivers for it

or NTFS and find unix drivers for it.

Generally I'd say the NTFS drivers for Linux are more mature than EXT3 drivers for windows so thats probably the way I'd go, despite EXT3 being technically a slightly better filesystem....

EDIT: Sod all point using FAT32, limits on file size, NTFS is far more advanced and is easy to get working with Linux so why bother.
 
Urm im going on the traditionalist view of make a fat32 partition (just make in in linux with the command makedosfs and you can have massive partitions... iv got one at 160gig) just as the fat drivers are old stable and reliable in both os's...
 
pingwing said:
Urm im going on the traditionalist view of make a fat32 partition (just make in in linux with the command makedosfs and you can have massive partitions... iv got one at 160gig) just as the fat drivers are old stable and reliable in both os's...
Click to expand...

Despite having a 4GB file size limit? I don't know about other people but I have quite a few single files over 4GB in size, some as large as 8GB...
 
allow me to challenge your plan for partitions 2 & 3. I would do this:

Code: 
Partition 1 = 20GB, NTFS, Windows XP, bootable
Partition 2 = 100MB, EXT3, /boot, bootable
Partition 3 = 24GB, LVM
                 LVM 1 = 2GB, SWAP
                 LVM 2 = 4GB, EXT3, /home
                 LVM 3 = 4GB, EXT3, /tmp
                 LVM 4 = 4GB, EXT3, /usr
                 LVM 5 = 4GB, EXT3, /var
                 LVM 6 = 6GB, EXT3, /
Partition 4 = 116GB, EXT3, Data

You can resize the LVM groups and partitions within them on the fly, and they don't need to remain contiguous like partitions do. You can also do snapshots.
 
Last edited:
Trifid said:
Despite having a 4GB file size limit? I don't know about other people but I have quite a few single files over 4GB in size, some as large as 8GB...
Click to expand...

OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH, sorry completally for got about the size restiction on the actually file size.... (thought we were all on about windows limits on creating the partition in the fisrt place)

yeah id do the ext3 for windows method then as i never really liked the ntfs drivers (iv only seen them able to read drives a few times)
 
Within the last year Linux has been able to write to NTFS partitions, certainly The NTFS3g driver that Fedora and Ubuntu ship with is able to. I've not actually tested write performance to it though but it isn't too shabby.
 
Trifid said:
Within the last year Linux has been able to write to NTFS partitions, certainly The NTFS3g driver that Fedora and Ubuntu ship with is able to. I've not actually tested write performance to it though but it isn't too shabby.
Click to expand...

Indeed, I'd say the NTFS3g drivers are far more advanced and stable (not to mention better in performance) than the ext3 drivers for windows are...
 
As far as I know there isn't an ext3 driver for Windows, only ext2, so no journal while in Windows. I'd go for NTFS for this reason.
 
I use an NTFS data partition with vista and ubuntu, no complaints here. I used to use the ext2 driver you mentioned on my old comp with XP and ubuntu, which again worked fine so don't think you can go massively wrong.
 
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