solving for cross-platform storage
Scenario – imagine you consistently use 2 or 3 OSes on a regular basis (some combination of BeOS, Amiga, and Apple DOS obviously), and you are convinced of the following:
- No laptop or desktop computer hardware can be trusted
- Hardware is only as good as the software you install on it
- Universal Serial Bus, while definitely the bus of the devil, is the only consistently, possibly even “universally”, supported peripheral interface
- all OSes are inherently sucky
Where do you put your big stuff? Video, music, project files, plans for perpetual motion devices, and so on?
Well first off, external hard drives with USB interfaces is the obvious fulfiller of the hardware portion of those requirements. But how about partition formatting? NTFS and HFS+, the proprietary darlings of Microsoft and Apple respectively, are just about as compatible on a single system as an atheist and a Mormon in a coffee shop; support for these two in open source platforms can be rocky.
For a long while, FAT32 served as the lingua franca of formatting, with native support available in Windows and “good enough” support in Linux and OS X. But it’s not without its problems. In addition to its non-case-sensitivity (“SCREWYOU.TXT” is the same thing as “screwyou.txt”, which is lame), I find it slow and messy, and probaby the most fragile filesystem in terms of error and damage control, just a notch about FAT16. It’s beyond the scope of this blog to bother explaining my opinion, lest I never post anything, ever, so let’s just leave it at “I hate FAT32″.
Enter ext3. Long the standard of Linux drives everywhere, it suddenly gained greater relevance as the Mac OS became the UNIX-based OS X — you can use ext3 natively on this system just as you would on any BSD, Linux, or UNIX system. Suddenly, Mac and Linux boxes have something in common. Windows, however, remained just out of reach, unless you were willing to experiment with the safety of your data.
It wasn’t until last year around this time that I found a stable ext3 reading/writing experience for Windows in EXT3 IFS [located at fs-driver.org]. And wouldn’t you know it, it’s Free.
I experimented with all 3 OSes at my disposal: OS X on my G4 laptop, Win Xp and later Vista on my Dell laptops, and Linux on my other Dell laptop, and found basically nothing to be unhappy about. It’s awesome to be able to format a USB thumb drive with ext3 and use it seamlessly across Windows, Mac, Linux, and even my Playstation 3.
A few months ago, I was retiring my G4 laptop and I needed to move my 180GB digital music collection (mp3s, mp4s, oggs, they all coexist peacefully for me) to a larger drive that didn’t make an ominous clicking sound. Having acquired a lovely external Lacie 500GB drive for a keen $80 or so, my choice of hard drive formats switched from FAT32 to EXT3. It’s been 8 months since I did so, and I haven’t looked back.
So, my solution for cross-platform hard drive storage: ext3.
That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Or at least until something better comes along.
