[TriLUG] USB external hard drive for Linux machine

[Joel Ebel]

Any external hard drive should work just fine with FC 3 and Windows, as 
long as you are using windows 2000 or XP.  The issue is going to be what 
filesystem to use.  If you want the drive to be readable and writable in 
both windows and linux, you'll probably want to use FAT32.  FAT32 has a 
lot of limitations, particularly on large drives.  While its 
theoretically possible to have a FAT32 filesystem as large as 2 
terabytes, that's not a great idea since you'll have huge clusters so 
even the smallest file will take up a lot of space.  I don't think 
windows 2000 supports FAT32 filesystems larger than 32 GB, and last time 
I tried, Windows XP would read them but refused to create them.  You can 
create a larger one in linux if you like, just know it might not be 
readable in windows 2000, and you'll be wasting a lot of space with the 
allocation table and in slack space.  Another option is to partition it 
into 32 GB or smaller partitions to ensure compatibility, but then you 
have to deal with segmented storage which also has its disadvantages. 
FAT32 also has a maximum filesize of 2 GB I believe.  At least I haven't 
even been able to use anything bigger than that.  NTFS and linux 
filesystems seems to handle them fine.

A good reference in trying to understand the limitations of the FAT 
filesystem on large partitions is the pcguide online:
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/file/part.htm

Joel

Wesley (Xiaoyu) Zhang (xyzhang) wrote:
> Hi All,
>  
> I am considering acquiring external USB hard drive for my home network.
> I would like to use it on both my windows machine and FC 3.0.  Anyone
> has recommendation? Any gotcha I may need to know?
>  
> Thanks,
> Wesley