What file system is best supported by Linux and FreeBSD?

A

ad5du

I am running Linux and thinking of trying FreeBSD or PC-BSD. I have one 2 TB external harddrive that is USB 3.0 and one that is 3 TB. They are now both fornated with ext4 there is not much on the 3 TB yet and I could probably fit what is on the 3 TB on the 2 TB and reformat it. I have googled and seem to find conflicting information on whether or not there is read-write suport for ext4. Should I change the 3 TB back to NTFS, ext2 or can I use ext4. Then should I move everything to the 3 TB and reformat the 2 TB?

I consided putting FreeBSD on my laptop first and not changing my tower but now I was thinking trying PC-BSD which my laptop would not support, but I haven't ruled out.
 
I want to be able to copy stuff to the drive from Linux and then switch to FreeBSD and possibly switch back to Linux.
I have about 2 terabytes of data I don't want to loose if I switch operating systems.
I don't think FAT is a good option for a 2 or 3 TB drive unless I brake it up in to several partiions.
NTFS is ok in Linux but a little bit of a cpu hog but tolerable. I don't know how it will be in FreeBSD.
I wish ext4 read-write was available on both.

I may just try FreeBSD on my laptop for a while first but it is a little under powered to use as my
primary computer and it won't run PC-BSD which is what I was thinking about doing.
 
FAT file system best supported file system by Linux and FreeBSD. Obviously FAT is not an option for large drives. I am not sure how is NTFS support in FreeBSD (OpenBSD supports reasonably well) while Linux support for NTFS is definitely OK at least in my experience with 1 TB drives. You really have no good option. The best Linux file system is XFS the best FreeBSD file system is ZFS. They have nothing in common. EXT[2-4] are legacy Linux file systems which really have no use in outside world.
 
In my experience the best way to share partitions between FreeBSD and Linux is NTFS. It is supportet well by FreeBSD, Linux and even Windows :p .

Not the solution of your request, but nice to know: you can also mount UFS in Linux (read only)
mount -r -t ufs -o ufstype=ufs2 /dev/sde2 /mnt
 
Being primitively simple, FAT32 will probably be the best (or least worst) portable filesystem you could access safely in read-write mode. Its performance is also quite good.
As far as I know, it supports volumes up to 2TB on 512-byte-per-sector disks. The maximum file size is 4GB though.
If memory serves me well, Windows is incapable of formatting 2TB volumes due to limitations of its format utility. I don't think FreeBSD's newfs_msdos(8) suffers such limitations, but you'll have to try it yourself to find out for sure.
 
uzsolt said:
ZFS works well with both systems.
Click to expand...
I hope ZFS on Linux doesn't work like 9p file system from Plain 9 ;) I waisted 2 days to get that thing working on Red Hat 6.5 before giving up and mounting my data pool from the KVM host via NFS to my KVM guests.
 
Oko said:
uzsolt said:
ZFS works well with both systems.
Click to expand...
I hope ZFS on Linux doesn't work like 9p file system from Plain 9 ;) I waisted 2 days to get that thing working on Red Hat 6.5 before giving up and mounting my data pool from the KVM host via NFS to my KVM guests.
Click to expand...
I've used ZFS on Arch and on FreeBSD, common home-partition. Yes, it's only a "desktop" usage (on laptop :) ), but worked for me well.
 
I have no problems with ZFS on Linux, runs quite well.

Here are my preferred solutions for external media.

ZFS:
- good for a file system with working hardware (no defect RAM [1]), otherwise you might get into big trouble
- works on some operation systems (no Windows)
- POSIX compliant (not like FAT)
- less good for a swappable drive, you might implement some short cuts to import and export your pool
- checksumming, compression and all the other good stuff available

NTFS:
- supported on more platforms than ZFS
- POSIX compliant (folder/files with { : * ? " < > | } not accessible in Windows)
 
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