Big external drives - which filesystem?

[Chris Hastie]

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