External SATA - install questions

[bigmac99]

I have recently been given a 500 gig sata drive at work. My computer that I use for linux at work does not have sata onboard. So, I came up with the idea to purchase an external sata housing and an external sata card, so that I can move the drive around between windows and linux machines as I need to.

What would be the best way to do this? If I don't format it as fat32 or ntfs, the windows machine won't see it. But is writing to ntfs from linux supported now? If I use fat32, how would I have to partition the drive? Isn't there a limit to the size of fat32 partitions?

Thanks
Charles

[XiaoKJ]

Please, for god's sake, still support fat32. ntfs writing is supported with the new ntfs-3g driver, but it is still experimental. And do the fat32 formatting in linux as windows deliberately handicapped fat32 to be a little smaller than it can be. On the 500 gig disk, though, it is still going to reach the limits.

Maybe, you would like to try having both ntfs and fat32 on the disk, and a spare ntfs partition to test out ntfs-3g too :)

[psych-major]

Also, fat32 has a maximum file size of 2GB. Back in the day that was a lot of data, but now with DVD-type files, etc, that can be an issue.

[retsaw]

Something like this (http://www.directron.com/nst260subk.html) (note that this is just the first one I found when doing a quick search) would be better, this case has SATA and USB connections so you could use a SATA connection when available and revert to USB for computers that don't have SATA, this'll save you getting a SATA card, although USB will be a bit slower than SATA.

I believe the partition size limit for FAT32 is somewhere in the region of 4 TB so you won't have a problem with that and the file size limit is 4 GB not 2GB. FAT32 would probably be your best bet despite it's limitations, though you might want an NTFS partition if you will be transfering large files.