Sunday 1 September 2019

external hard drive - Cross-platform usable filesystem with large file support


What is the best filesystem to use cross-platform (Linux, Windows, OS X) which supports disk sizes of at least 2TB and file sizes >4GB?


I'm planning to use it on a USB drive on different computers.


Are there any filesystems that can be used on all the named OSes without installing additional drivers?



Answer



Look at this chart on Wikipedia and scroll down to the last table for "Supporting operating systems." This lists OS support by file system.


As you can see, there is no file system that is covers all OS platforms, the closest being FAT16. FAT32 is a close 2nd, requiring 3rd party driver support for z/OS.


Since you require read/write support and large files and file systems, the best option would be NTFS. Obviously, Windows OSs support NTFS. Modern Linux kernels (2.2+) can read and write NTFS natively. OS X supports reading NTFS natively and writing with NTFS-3G.


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