Selecting a filesystem type...


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I have a fileserver running slackware-current which has 3 hard drives. currently, they are all formatted with ext3 but i would like in the future to be able to take one of the drives and put it in a windows machine. which is the best filesystem to do this?

i don't have any files over 4 GB, so FAT32 could be feasible...but can i use long filenames? i think if i mount as vfat, i should be fine.

NTFS and the whole writing in linux thing has me a bit weary, i've heard of captive-ntfs...anyone have any personal experience?

are there any other filesystems supported by both operating systems i don't know about?

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FAT32 isn't a bad choice for a filesystem that Windows needs to be able to read/write to.

Also, I have heard of ext drivers for WIndows to allow Windows to read native Linux filesystems.

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The problem with most of the drivers/programs out there to let you read and/or write the other OS's filesystems is that they are buggy at best.

If you don't have anything over 4 GB, your best bet would be FAT32 as both OS's support full read/write natively.

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captive-ntfs absolutely rocks, and is pretty much completely safe for any and all writing operations, since it uses microsoft's NTFS driver.

Since NTFS is a far superior filesystem to FAT32 (but not a patch on decent linux filesystems like reiserfs...) I'd personally go with NTFS.

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