[lug] Re: [NCLUG] Cross-platform large external hard drive filesystem?

[John Karns]

On 12 Jul 2002, Tkil said:

>
> Just a minor update:  I went with FAT32 for now, and it's working fine
> under Windows 2000 and Linux.  I'll get a chance to try it on a
> Macintosh soon, and we'll see how things go there.  Thanks for the
> tips from everyone, I'll let you know.

One minor issue to be aware of would be framentation.  If you're in a
situation where many temp files are being created, possibly accompanied by
a good deal of mem swapping, then things can get ugly with FAT.  I recall
a friend a few years back who was doing a good deal of development (i.e.,
using it pretty hard) on an NT system installed on a FAT partition and
ended up with a hard crash.  Although with the larger ram and hd
capacities in todays machines, that problem may not be as threatening as
long as there is ample available space on the hd.  Something to keep an
eye on though.  This probably doesn't apply directly if the FAT partition
is not being used as the system partition for w2k.

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John Karns                                        jkarns at csd.net