From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Thu Nov 16 08:57:31 2006 Return-Path: X-Original-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E87B416A417 for ; Thu, 16 Nov 2006 08:57:31 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from alistair.sutton@gmail.com) Received: from nf-out-0910.google.com (nf-out-0910.google.com [64.233.182.184]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4A97243D62 for ; Thu, 16 Nov 2006 08:57:30 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from alistair.sutton@gmail.com) Received: by nf-out-0910.google.com with SMTP id x37so550784nfc for ; Thu, 16 Nov 2006 00:57:30 -0800 (PST) DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; q=dns; c=nofws; s=beta; d=gmail.com; h=received:message-id:date:from:to:subject:in-reply-to:mime-version:content-type:content-transfer-encoding:content-disposition:references; b=uYzCXzmfDmYk8KcsHrG/yyRWzcY4fcj0Dhun9Zst8pgP3MnIyCzAEZav/dJpnG9Ycyc1p8nHY+dty9aA9bQ7eTmypeififIM1BB2MFg7EzJhonqLX88kX4sCIj/wAd4SYe47zxz6bpqXjFudyGZWG3UOFuJ6763RlqxFNIVU7A8= Received: by 10.78.68.18 with SMTP id q18mr294954hua.1163667448978; Thu, 16 Nov 2006 00:57:28 -0800 (PST) Received: by 10.78.202.14 with HTTP; Thu, 16 Nov 2006 00:57:28 -0800 (PST) Message-ID: Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2006 08:57:28 +0000 From: "Alistair Sutton" To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org In-Reply-To: <3UroRaFMaCXFFwwJ@celandine.oak-wood.co.uk> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline References: <3UroRaFMaCXFFwwJ@celandine.oak-wood.co.uk> Subject: Re: Big external drives - which filesystem? X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2006 08:57:32 -0000 On 16/11/06, Chris Hastie wrote: > I've just acquired a Western Digital 200GB USB 2 external HDD. After > some initial glitches my FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE machine seems to recognise > it fine. > > It comes pre-formatted with a single FAT32 file system (although > confusingly there is a note in the manual about FAT32 not supporting > partitions >32 GB and suggesting you change it to NTFS). > > Attempting to mount this hits the "mountmsdosfs(); disk too big, sorry" > problem. > > The primary intended use for this drive is for off-site backups, but it > would be useful if it was formatted such that I can easily plug it into > Windows boxes to get at files occasionally. What are my best options for > achieving this? > > The MSDOSFS_LARGE kernel option seems to come with a lot of warnings and > caveats. Is it really as ropey as it sounds? Is NTFS an option? I've not had any trouble using that option but then I tend not to have too many files open once I've mounted the drive. IIRC the main warnings about using the option was that memory isn't freed until the drive is unmounted and as a result would gradually eat up your RAM the more files you had open etc etc. I could be wrong though ;-) > Or would > I be better partitioning the drive into two FAT32 partitions of < 128GB > each? If I go down that route how does this appear to FreeBSD - > presumably as different slices on da0 which are mounted separately? You'd end up with da0s1 and da0s2 (for example). Al -- WWW: http://ajs.no-dns-yet.org.uk GPG/PGP: http://ajs.no-dns-yet.org.uk/pubkey.gpg