Big external drives - which filesystem?

[Alistair Sutton]

On 16/11/06, Chris Hastie <lists at oak-wood.co.uk> wrote:
> 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?

I've not had any trouble using that option but then I tend not to have
too many files open once I've mounted the drive. IIRC the main
warnings about using the option was that memory isn't freed until the
drive is unmounted and as a result would gradually eat up your RAM the
more files you had open etc etc. I could be wrong though ;-)

> 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?

You'd end up with da0s1 and da0s2 (for example).

Al
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