External HD Partitioning & Formatting Considerations

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Hi,

One of my clients has a mixed Linux/Mac OS/Windows environment in his office. He just purchased a 4 TB external hard disk, which he intends to use on his various workstations.

Up until recently, I’ve been using plain old MBR/FAT for hard disks in mixed environments. Fire up fdisk, make one big 0b type partition, and then format it using mkdosfs.

Unfortunately, there’s a 2 TB limit to that.

Of course, I could still use a GPT partition, but then I’d still have to format it using a “common denominator” filesystem, e. g. FAT… which is also limited to 2 TB as far as I know.

So what now? Use Windows 10 to format the disk using NTFS? This, Windows and Linux could use it, and I’d have to check if Mac OS can manage NTFS file systems. A few years ago, it didn’t.

Any suggestions?

Niki
—
Microlinux – Solutions informatiques durables
7, place de l’église – 30730 Montpezat Site : https://www.microlinux.fr Mail : info@microlinux.fr Tél. : 04 66 63 10 32
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8 thoughts on - External HD Partitioning & Formatting Considerations

  • I strongly dislike moving removable disks between computers, especially with differing operating systems.

    I would instead recommend getting/building a NAS aka file server and using the network to share files, or make backups, or whatever.

    —
    -john r pierce
    recycling used bits in santa cruz

  • I second that. exFAT is the way to go. Support is built in for the Mac and Windows and even Linux Mint. Support is easily installed for CentOS and Ubuntu. Looks like there was some compatability issues if the exFAT drive was formatted on a Mac. So be sure to format the drive  on Windows or Linux.  The maximum file size is 16 exabytes and 512 TB is the maximum recommended disk drive size.  We use it at work to transfer large files between Windows, Mac and Linux using external drives. Ed

    On Saturday, November 30, 2019, 2:38:33 PM EST, Pierre Emerald wrote:

    What about exfat ?

    2019年11月30日(土) 18:10 Fred Smith :

    CentOS mailing list CentOS@CentOS.org https://lists.CentOS.org/mailman/listinfo/CentOS

  • Le 30/11/2019 à 21:50, John Pierce a écrit :

    Hell is paved with good intentions (french saying).

    We already have OwnCloud running perfectly here.

    Except the machines are on different networks, and we don’t want to upload a few terabytes of archives over a crappy internet connection. :o)

    Cheers,

    Niki

    —
    Microlinux – Solutions informatiques durables
    7, place de l’église – 30730 Montpezat Site : https://www.microlinux.fr Mail : info@microlinux.fr Tél. : 04 66 63 10 32
    Mob. : 06 51 80 12 12

  • is there at least one machine on each LAN thats running the same OS ? I’d use that for the removable disk so its not moving between differing OS’s.

    —
    -john r pierce
    recycling used bits in santa cruz