NTFS-3G: the universal filesystem
After I started running Linux and then Mac OS X, in addition to Windows,
I started on a quest to find the universal filesystem.
I had multiboot systems and external drives where I wanted to
to be able to read and write disks under multiple operating systems.
The obvious choice is FAT32,
the ubiquitous, lowest-common denominator filesystem.
FAT32 is supported out-of-the-box by
all major operating systems, digital cameras, and PDAs,
so that's a huge advantage.
FAT32 also has major shortcomings:
- Maximum file size is 4GB. I have ISOs, MPEGs, and other large files exceeding this limit.
- Fragmentation happens too easily.
- Timestamps: accurate only to 2-second resolution. No notion of timezones or UTC.
- Journaling: none. Preferred for robustness.
- ACLs or Permissions. Nothing beyond R/W.
I experimented with ext3 (and its non-journaling sibling, ext2)
on Windows and later on the Mac.
On Windows, ext2fs works well and I used it happily for several months
on a machine dualbooting XP and Ubuntu.
It did not work well with Vista initially, though that seems to have been fixed since.
My experiences on the Mac were bad:
ext2fsx caused some kernel panics,
which was enough for me to abandon it.
There was no free solution for reading and writing Mac HFS+ disks
under Linux and Windows the last time that I checked.
Both Linux and Macs natively support mounting NTFS disks read-only.
The NTFS-3G project allows Linux to write to NTFS disks,
and Mac NTFS-3G does likewise for Macs.
I've never had a problem with NTFS-3G and it's worked
flawlessly under Linux and Mac for me.