Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2006 08:51:24 +0000 From: Chris Hastie <lists@oak-wood.co.uk> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Big external drives - which filesystem? Message-ID: <3UroRaFMaCXFFwwJ@celandine.oak-wood.co.uk>
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I've just acquired a Western Digital 200GB USB 2 external HDD. After some initial glitches my FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE machine seems to recognise it fine. It comes pre-formatted with a single FAT32 file system (although confusingly there is a note in the manual about FAT32 not supporting partitions >32 GB and suggesting you change it to NTFS). Attempting to mount this hits the "mountmsdosfs(); disk too big, sorry" problem. The primary intended use for this drive is for off-site backups, but it would be useful if it was formatted such that I can easily plug it into Windows boxes to get at files occasionally. What are my best options for achieving this? The MSDOSFS_LARGE kernel option seems to come with a lot of warnings and caveats. Is it really as ropey as it sounds? Is NTFS an option? Or would I be better partitioning the drive into two FAT32 partitions of < 128GB each? If I go down that route how does this appear to FreeBSD - presumably as different slices on da0 which are mounted separately? Or am I just asking for trouble using these filesystems and should just stick to ufs2 and abandon any plans to maintain compatibility with windows machines? Thanks for your help. -- Chris Hastie
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