OT: most "universal" file system for 1TB external USB2 hard drive

[Polytropon]

On Fri, 22 Aug 2008 13:13:29 -0500, "Andrew Gould" <andrewlylegould at gmail.com> wrote:
> I couldn't help myself.  During lunch, I found a 3.5" 1TB SATA internal HD
> **and** a USB2 HD enclosure for SATA drives on sale at large % discounts.
> It was more than I could resist.
> 
> The operating systems in my home include FreeBSD, NetBSD, Mac OS X and
> Windows XP Pro.  If I want all of these systems to be able to read and write
> to the drive, what file system should I use?  I know fat32 is pretty
> universal, but is it advisable?

Well, the filesystem with the most interchange quality isn't a
real file system - it's tar. Inside the UNIX world, it's very
welcome if you need to exchange data from, let's say, Sun, SGI
and x86 UNIX systems using a physical device.

Because "Windows" is intendedly not able to access file systems
that are not made by MICROS~1, UFS (which you could access from
Mac OS X as well as from the BSDs) would be a good choice, but it
can't be chose due to your requirements in this setting.

Something like an MS-DOS filesystem would be accessible from
all the systems you mentioned, but it doesn't bring you much
comfort (for example no user management, no access rights).



-- 
Polytropon
>From Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...