Any external hard drive should work just fine with FC 3 and Windows, as
long as you are using windows 2000 or XP. The issue is going to be what
filesystem to use. If you want the drive to be readable and writable in
both windows and linux, you'll probably want to use FAT32. FAT32 has a
lot of limitations, particularly on large drives. While its
theoretically possible to have a FAT32 filesystem as large as 2
terabytes, that's not a great idea since you'll have huge clusters so
even the smallest file will take up a lot of space. I don't think
windows 2000 supports FAT32 filesystems larger than 32 GB, and last time
I tried, Windows XP would read them but refused to create them. You can
create a larger one in linux if you like, just know it might not be
readable in windows 2000, and you'll be wasting a lot of space with the
allocation table and in slack space. Another option is to partition it
into 32 GB or smaller partitions to ensure compatibility, but then you
have to deal with segmented storage which also has its disadvantages.
FAT32 also has a maximum filesize of 2 GB I believe. At least I haven't
even been able to use anything bigger than that. NTFS and linux
filesystems seems to handle them fine.
A good reference in trying to understand the limitations of the FAT
filesystem on large partitions is the pcguide online:
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/file/part.htm
Joel
Wesley (Xiaoyu) Zhang (xyzhang) wrote:
Hi All,
I am considering acquiring external USB hard drive for my home network.
I would like to use it on both my windows machine and FC 3.0. Anyone
has recommendation? Any gotcha I may need to know?
Thanks,
Wesley
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