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I'd like advice and recomendations as to what filesystem would be ideal for me to use for a 320GB HDD that will replace what appears to be an aging/failing 250GB one.

Ideally, I'd like something I can at least /read/ from Windows/BSD, but the disk itself will ultimately be being used in a Linux system.

Looking at what's available, and doing a bit of asking around, I've variously heard that exFAT is not the most reliable on Linux (and, like FAT32, you lose the whole "any character except '/' and NUL for filenames), Btrfs randomly regresses and causes kernel panics, UFS and Linux don't really like each other, and ZFS's metadata/management overhead makes it feel like the data is passing through molasses.

Of course all the filesystems mentioned have impressive pro-points, but when the rubber meets the road, I'm obviously looking for reasons I might wake up one day to find my filesystem in more pieces than I left it in the previous night.

Right now I'm considering ext3, ext4 and ZFS.

I use ext4 for my /; it seems quite fast (it fscks literally in realtime, it's amazing), it of course "just works," and requires practically zero configuration. It's really awesome and exactly what I want. However, it seems that FreeBSD doesn't really support ext4... ???

ext3 doesn't have the fast fsck features of ext4, but it seems to have slightly more general access/read support from FreeBSD and Windows (the latter via Ext2fsd).

ZFS is an interesting-sounding alternative because, at the end of the day, this is just a little 320GB archival HDD I don't need amazing read speed from, I've heard you can read it from Windows, and BSD supports it natively. I'm not entirely sure about the metadata thing though, apparently virtualized access to it can be iffy, and I don't completely get how ZFS on Linux works as a "thing". I've also heard that it requires a decent gob of RAM to run happily, which the host system running the disk definitely doesn't have.

Based on my current analyses, ext3 looks like exactly what I'm looking for, but I'm throwing my situation out there in case there's a solution that nails my requirements better than what I've found as yet.

Suggestions/advice/thoughts appreciated! Thanks.

Community
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i336_
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  • Do you really need to read the system directly from the different Operating systems? Maybe a network share is the way to do that? – mc0e Jan 30 '15 at 13:55
  • @mc0e: The HDD will be being pulled and temporarily placed in another computer, likely via a USB enclosure (I don't have a NAS [enclosure] at this point). So unfortunately yes :( – i336_ Jan 31 '15 at 10:57
  • Is it an option to run a linux virtual machine for reading the disk? – mc0e Jan 31 '15 at 11:33
  • @mc0e: The hardware the disk would be being installed in does have VT-x, but performance seems to *just* trip the edge of "uncomfortably laggy". I might poke this option a bit more because a VM would be great, but it would probably turn out to take quite a while for full-disk backups. – i336_ Jan 31 '15 at 17:38

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If you can work within the constraints, vfat (fat32) may actually be the most compatible.

Dan Armstrong
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    Always love the fact that at the end of the day you just can't keep fat32 down... – Gravy Jan 30 '15 at 09:53
  • Three caveats: `1)` lack of large file support, `2)` crippling filename limitations, and `3)` no journaling, so very very unsafe. :( – i336_ Jan 30 '15 at 13:54