Secondary Storage Question

[decatur-linux]

I am running Feisty Fawn on a Pentium 4 computer with 1Gb RAM. I boot from an IDE drive (160 Gb) but have a secondary drive, a SATA drive with 200 Gb space.

This secondary drive is used exclusively for network storage. [I also have a computer running Win2K on my LAN.] Right now I have the SATA disk partitioned with two (2) partitions, one FAT32 and the other ext3.

My question is this: since this SATA drive is used EXCLUSIVELY for storage, how should I format it? Particularly in the light of running backup from both my Windows computer and my Linux computer using tar to create tarballs. I will NOT be accessing the SATA drive from my Windows computer, but will be copying the files FROM the Windows computer having mounted the necessary shares on my Linux computer and treating the files as local files.

(1) Is fat32 more / less efficient in storage than ext3?
(2) Should I consider some other format for this storage?
(3) What are the pros and cons for fat32 and ext3?
(4) What am I overlooking? What other considerations should I be considering?

Thanks for your insight and input!

[slush1000]

Re: Secondary Storage Question

I have a similar setup where a drive is specifically used for storage between a Kubuntu and Windows XP. I had formatted that drive to Fat32 simply for the fact that I needed windows to access the files directly from time to time.

To try and answer the questions:
(1) I believe that ext3 is a more efficient file system. The way that fat32 writes to the disk leaves the file system more susceptible to fragmentation. Maybe someone else could elaborate on that.
(2) I don't see any issues with using ext3 I would recommend it.
(3) Pros of Ext3 over fat32 - more efficient use of space, not as susceptible to fragmentation of the files. elaborate anyone??
(4) Potential problem if there is a need to access these files from a Windows computer in the future. Although you could always use software such as http://www.diskinternals.com/linux-reader/ which allows a windows machine to access ext2 and ext3 file systems.

Hope this helps.

[IndyTim]

Re: Secondary Storage Question

I have a 320G SATA external that I use for storage/backup between both Windows and Linux. I have the entire drive formatted to ext3.

If I need to have a "conversation" with the external from Windows, I installed the following on to Windows.

http://www.fs-driver.org/

Just another perspective.

IndyTim