Best solution for large 300GB external drive to be used on Win and Linux

(Top posting fixed).

The only "inefficiency" is with the block size. FAT32 supports up to 2TB volumes with file sizes up to 4GB. It also supports 255 character file names. However, it is limited to 268,435,456 clusters (blocks).

So, based on a 2TB volume, each cluster becomes 8KB, although the file allocation table (FAT) with clusters this size is a whopping 1GB! Considering how often the FAT needs to be referenced during operation, the FAT would need to be cached to get anywhere near "reasonable" performance - hope you have a lot of RAM for a 2TB FAT32 parbreastion! IOW, each cluster requires 4bytes in the FAT (4x8=32, hence FAT*32*)

For your 300GB drive the FAT size by cluster size goes like this:

FAT (MB) Cluster Size (KB) 300 4 150 8 75 16 37.5 32

The cluster (block) size is significant because that is the smallest allocation unit on the parbreastion for files. If the file you are storing is smaller than the cluster, or not an exact multiple of the cluster size, you have "slack space".

If you're storing lots of small files, you want the smallest cluster you can allocate, but you'll pay for it with a big-butt FAT which will need to be cached for any reasonable performance, so butt-loads of RAM. If you'll be storing smaller number of much bigger files (high bit-rate MP3's, CD ISO's, etc) you can get away with a bigger cluster size and smaller FAT, but for any file that isn't an exact multiple of the cluyster size, you'll waste space with slack space,

eg, buttuming a cluster size of 32KB: a 1MB file fits exactly into 32 clusters. 1MB+1byte file fits into 33 clusters, but the 33rd cluster is 99.9% slack space. The same scenario with 4KB clusters would yield about quarter the slack-space, because the 257th cluster would still only contain a single byte. See how it works?

The lack of reliability is more a throw-back to FAT32's lack of fault tolerance. It is NOT a journalling file system and does not recover well from failures. However, provided the hardware (drive+system I-O+memory etc) it is running on is reliable, there's no reason why a FAT32 parbreastion would spontaneously go "bad". Keep in mind, most OS'es will try to cache as much (if not all) of FAT as possible, so if your memory is flakey, the FAT-data could get hosed in the event of failure.

Cheers,

James -- Humor in the Court: Q: What is your relationship with the plaintiff? A: She is my daughter. Q: Was she your daughter on February 13, 1979?