I'd tend to agree with Snurg and obsigna on this - for a couple reasons, the first being that if the drive is a portable USB drive, it may be connected to multiple computers that are themselves possibly portable, and not all of those devices may be OK with more powerful/complicated file systems. I'd tend to use EXT2 or EXT3 in this circumstance.
EXT2 might not be a good option if there's very much writing (has no journaling), but may be OK for personal mainly read usage. For read/write, EXT3 has journaling, and might be better IMO. Linux based cell phones use EXT3 or EXT4, and they all use some form of NAND based storage. Unfortunately, there's no EXT4 for FreeBSD. No way I'd ever use *FAT* for this. Eventually it would be nice to see BeFS ported for this purpose, as it has some great features.
Some EXT2/USB users are suggesting that fstab should be set to mount everything with "noatime" option. No matter what, eventually all USB will fail, so should have a good backup plan.
EXT2 might not be a good option if there's very much writing (has no journaling), but may be OK for personal mainly read usage. For read/write, EXT3 has journaling, and might be better IMO. Linux based cell phones use EXT3 or EXT4, and they all use some form of NAND based storage. Unfortunately, there's no EXT4 for FreeBSD. No way I'd ever use *FAT* for this. Eventually it would be nice to see BeFS ported for this purpose, as it has some great features.
Some EXT2/USB users are suggesting that fstab should be set to mount everything with "noatime" option. No matter what, eventually all USB will fail, so should have a good backup plan.