Subject: Re: file system format for large, shared, removable USB disk
To: None <netbsd-users@NetBSD.org>
From: Steven M. Bellovin <smb@cs.columbia.edu>
List: netbsd-users
Date: 09/02/2006 15:54:20
On Sat, 2 Sep 2006 15:41:53 -0400, "Charles M. Hannum" <mycroft@MIT.EDU>
wrote:

> On Sat, Sep 02, 2006 at 02:34:56PM -0500, Michael Parson wrote:
> > On Sat, Sep 02, 2006 at 03:26:41PM -0400, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
> > > I need to buy a large external hard drive that needs to work with both
> > > NetBSD 3.0.1 and Linux, read-write.  What are good choices for the file
> > > system?  Is our ext2 read-write support good enough?  What is the largest
> > > file system I can create that way?
> > 
> > I've not tried ext2 under NetBSD, from what I've heard, it seems to do OK.
> 
> Unless clustering support has been added recently and I missed it, it
> does *not* "do OK".  The performance is worse than you can imagine.
> (Ditto for msdosfs.)
> 
I knew that for msdosfs; that's one of the reasons I asked.  Given the
limits on our USB driver, though, it isn't clear to me that our ext2
performance is the limiting factor...

More seriously -- for this particular application, I don't think
performance issues are critical.  I'm much more concerned with stability
and reliability.

		--Steven M. Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb