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FAT32 or NTFS with Linux?

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Steve Conner

Tue May 16 2006, 09:39AM

Registered Member #30 Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 10:52AM
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
Posts: 6706

Hi all

I'm in the middle of building a new OMG el1te PC that I want to dual boot WinXP and Linux. I intend to use it for multitrack audio recording (under both OSs), so I installed two 320GB hard drives, one for the OSs, applications, and swap space, and another for the audio files.

So this is what I want to debate: should I format the audio drive with NTFS or FAT32? This drive needs to be read and written as fast as possible by both Windows and Linux, and I'm worried that Linux's NTFS drivers might be slow.

The Linux filesystems aren't an option as it needs to be readable under Windows.

If FAT32 does turn out to be best, how the heck do I format it? XP won't let me format with anything other than NTFS nowadays.

I already formatted the XP system partition with NTFS, because the installer didn't give any other option :-<

<b>*edit* I googled a bit and found that NTFS support in the 2.6 kernel is pretty crappy- it's obviously a plan by Microsoft</b>

Liam

Tue May 16 2006, 10:37AM

Registered Member #113 Joined: Fri Feb 10 2006, 01:40AM
Location:
Posts: 49

I definitely wouldn't use NTFS for a daily-use PC. You can read NTFS really easily, but as for writing - it's not so straightforward. In fact, it's often downright risky.

Why not have 3 drives (logical or physical) - 2 for the OS and one common (formatted in FAT32). You can always format that last drive in Linux or you can use something like partition magic.

Good luck!

Steve Conner

Tue May 16 2006, 11:30AM

Registered Member #30 Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 10:52AM
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
Posts: 6706

I think 3 logical drives is kind of what I'm doing already. I used half of the space on the first physical drive for XP, and I'm going to install Linux into the other half. The second physical drive will be the common one.

I found a free utility for FAT32 formatting, but then I found out FAT32 has a 2GB size limit for a single file. That's only an hour and a half at 48kHz and 24 bits

I guess you can't win them all.

Bjørn

Tue May 16 2006, 12:31PM

Registered Member #27 Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 02:20AM
Location: Hyperborea
Posts: 2058

The file size limit for FAT32 is 4GB, that would give a bit over 4 hours for a 24 bit stereo recording. Since int is easier to type than unsigned int some programs have problems with more than 2^31 of anything.

Steve Conner

Tue May 16 2006, 02:36PM

Registered Member #30 Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 10:52AM
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
Posts: 6706

It seems I have another option, I can format the drive with the Linux ext2 filesystem, and install a driver to let XP recognize ext2. Or I could go get my wisdom teeth extracted, which sounds almost as much fun >_<

Hellmark

Tue May 16 2006, 05:29PM

Registered Member #189 Joined: Thu Feb 16 2006, 07:43PM
Location: Winfield, Missouri, USA
Posts: 46

the ext2 driver isnt hard to install, but personally I'd just go for Fat32.

Steve Conner

Tue May 16 2006, 10:17PM

Registered Member #30 Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 10:52AM
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
Posts: 6706

Done! With Tom Thornill's FAT32 Formatter.

Now I just need to figure out why my system drive appears as H when it ought to be C :-< I can change it with the disk management tool, but I get the feeling Windows, and any programs I installed might freak out.

...

Tue May 16 2006, 10:31PM

Registered Member #56 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 05:02AM
Location: Southern Califorina, USA
Posts: 2445

I would go with fat32. I am not sure what the deal with that 4gb limit, as I currently have ~10gb on a fat32 drive in my ubuntu box... I haven't looked at it with windows yet, but I assume it is readable...

As to formatting it, couldn't you drop in a ms boot disk with the m$ format utility on it (a win98 recovery disk works great but takes forever to load)? I formatted it with the integrated formatter in ubuntu... I set up my 30gb drive with 10gb for ubuntu, 1gb sawp, leftover as data, then in my 100gb drive I put in 20 for windows and the rest for data. The windows partition is ntfs, the data's are fat32. I would have had all of the os's on the same disk, but I question the reliability of the 100gb one, as I have sent two identical drives in already, so it is for static storage; whenever I put a file on it I either copy it on the good disk or if it is over a few gb I burn it on a dvd.

As to the ntfs support, I can read my ntfs partition in ubuntu just fine, but currently it is setup as a read only... So can't say much about writing to it.

Also, I would say you shouldn't need more than 20-30gb for your os's... If you have more than 10gb in linux you have way to much crap on it, and windows shouldn't be more than 10 unless you have a lot of stuff installed, under 20 unless you have a ton of games installed. So if I were you I would repartition so that you have like 250gb for data on the os drive, 40 for windows and 30 for linux (so you never run out of space). I suppose if you really wanted to trick out the system you put the disks in a raid1 array for a 640gb disk with like 200mb/s read/write speed and then get a cheapo 50gb for the os's. Might be worth the speed increase of the raid...

--edit--
looks like you figured it out on your own...

Wolfram

Wed May 17 2006, 07:41AM

Registered Member #33 Joined: Sat Feb 04 2006, 01:31PM
Location: Norway
Posts: 971

Single files can not be bigger than 4GiB on FAT32. The upper total disk size limit is 2TiB.

Steve Conner

Wed May 17 2006, 10:21AM

Registered Member #30 Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 10:52AM
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
Posts: 6706

Why do some people say the file size limit is 2GB then? (or 2GiB to be precise

)

I think a Win98 recovery disk will freak out at any drive bigger than 137GB, or whatever the magic number is. I don't see it working with SATA either. Anyway, I don't have a floppy drive to put it in!

I just did my first useful work on the new machine last night- in fact my previous post was made from it- and it's pretty good. I actually rather like XP, the secret to using it seems to be to leave all the settings on default and switch your brain off completely. This seems to get things done quicker and easier than a lot of other OS's I've used

I decided not to use RAID because I wanted my work physically on a separate hard drive. A 320GB home directory is hard enough to back up as it is.

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