160Gb HDDs, Linux, Windows, and File Systems

I may go another round with linux here soon since I have pretty much all but stopped playing games and everything I could ever want and more little things seems to be able to be found in Linux. Just FYI I'll probably go with Gentoo.

Anyways, I have 2 160Gb HDDs, one 80Gb and two 40Gb HDDs. All of them are filled with data but I gonna be able to free up enough to change file systems easily enough.

I am curious what file system would be best for data storeage of mp3's, anime that I would play/watch regulairly... a lot of it pretty much. The file system would need to be readily readable by both windows and Linux (I would deffinatly need Windows for just a few little apps that are windows only... and just in case I break somthing and need my computer really fast :/ ). Also what file system would be best to put windows on so I can see it in linux, and what file system is best for linux.

Depending on weather I actually DO put linux on (I may not if I am too busy in school to be able to spend the time on it... then I would wait and it later) this will be the first of MANY, MANY questions by me here

Well for the linux filesystem, reiser4 was just released and is supposed to be pretty fast. Otherwise I'd just stick with regular reiser. As for data storage that depends. Do you need to be able to write to the windows partions/drives? If so FAT32 is your best bet but if you only need linux to read from them then NTFS is a better choice. There is write support for NTFS but it is really slow so I guess you could use it as long as you don't mind waiting a while .

Ya, I heard about the NTFS write support but I can't deal with it being too slow, but arn't there problems with FAT32 and large Harddrives? Whats the deal (or do I just have to make multiple partitions?)

FAT32 is an adaptation of a really old filesystem, but it has a 2TB filesystem limit so you'll fine using it. If you want to use ext3, there's a windows driver for ext2 that will work. (Note that ext3 is backwards-compatible with ext2. You can mount an ext3 partition as ext2 without any problems, as long as it's cleanly unmounted when you're done. That's part of the design of ext3.)

CrashOveride said:

Ya, I heard about the NTFS write support but I can't deal with it being too slow, but arn't there problems with FAT32 and large Harddrives? Whats the deal (or do I just have to make multiple partitions?)

Click to expand...

The biggest issue there is that it doesn't like video files more than 2 or 4GB I can't remember the size on the top of my head.

The link for the ext2 driver doesn't seem to work...
Does the driver have full and good support of it (not like the NTFS for Linux or anything)?

EDIT: After a little googling I found SOME stuff that seems to say it works fine but most places link to the tuningsoft website, which is down or somthing...

CrashOveride said:

The link for the ext2 driver doesn't seem to work...
Does the driver have full and good support of it (not like the NTFS for Linux or anything)?

EDIT: After a little googling I found SOME stuff that seems to say it works fine but most places link to the tuningsoft website, which is down or somthing...

Click to expand...

Strange. It works for me. If it still doesn't work for you, you can grab the binary from sourceforge here.