NTFS or FAT32?

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Sadly enough, it's been a while since I've used Linux (due to school and interning jobs that pretty much forced me to use Windows). Neither have I been using Linux much at home, mostly for the same reasons: the most important one being homework. So, in the meanwhile, I lost track and don't know how things have improved as far as - for example - NTFS and Linux goes.

I currently have a 200 GB harddisc, which I originally formatted as FAT32 so I could also use it and under with Linux (which I did). I've recently bought an extra, 250 GB, external USB harddisc. It was formatted NTFS by default, and there's nothing on it (yet). I'm not sure wheter NTFS support has improved. So, my question is:

What would you recommend me? NTFS or FAT32? What is better in terms of speed, reliability and Linux support?

Thanks in advance.
Edited by - Oct. 18, 2005 05:36:23
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Unfortunately, things have only improved a modicum, simply because NTFS has had to be reverse engineered.

First off, I assume you mean which is better for having as a dual-use filesystem, yes? If you're not using windows, use almost *anything* other than windows-based filesystems, like ext3, Reiser or XFS.

NTFS is a better filesystem than FAT32, no question. If you want reliability, though, and a little better sleep at night, go FAT32. As long as you don't need to have exceedingly large files(in the gigabytes range), then as a transport mechanism, you'll do much better with FAT32. It's the great common denominator for all the OS's.

You can use NTFS, but there's always a slight reliability risk, plus I've found speed suffers.

Cheers,

J.C.
John Coldrick
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Hello J.C.,

I've got some trouble with that FAT on my mobile drive.
I tried ext2 and reiserfs, they are ok (reiser only deletes veeeeryyy sloooow).
But as soon as I reformat partition with FAT, opening a directory containing a few thousands of files (video sequence) is a misunderstanding.

I'm a bit unhappy about this
On windows there is absolutely no problem so I didn't expect any drawbacks in suse with such a stupid thing.

Do you have any idea what to do or where to search?

By the way what filesystem would you recommend under linux? I read great things about reiser4 performance, is it worth it? What filesystem do you store footage on while compositing?


Peter
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It's a port, non-official, and it's a non-native filesystem - I wouldn't be shocked at all if there's issues.

I can't answer your question. It might be related to having so many images in one dir, could be hardware(USB/USB2/firewire) driver issues. All I know is we use FAT32 with USB2 with no troubles here(with SUSE Enterprise 9, mind you, and that costs $$s) and have had reasonable success with Firewire(although less so).

I think I covered this in another thread about “best” - there isn't an overall best…they all have their strengths. Resier is a very good general fielsystem and is the one I like the most. If you're getting into large files, XFS is better, but XFS isnt' as fast with smaller files. I haven't had any personal experience with Reiser 4 - that's fairly new and haven't tested it yet.

Cheers,

J.C.
John Coldrick
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I think I'm going for FAT32 then. I'm not really dealing with files greater than 4GB at the time being anyway. Even if I have to deal with them, I could then - in the future - always decide to set up a seperate Linux (or so) fileserver with a filesystem that'd properly support that.

Thanks for the advice and information JColdrick and peliosis, also for your reply at the od!
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Thanks, good or bad, I have to use it
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