# What file system is best supported by Linux and FreeBSD?



## ad5du (Oct 4, 2014)

I am running Linux and thinking of trying FreeBSD or PC-BSD. I have one 2 TB external harddrive that is USB 3.0 and one that is 3 TB.   They are now both fornated with ext4  there is not much on the 3 TB yet and I could probably fit what is on the 3 TB on the 2 TB and reformat it. I have googled and seem to find conflicting information on whether or not there is read-write suport for ext4.  Should I change the 3 TB back to NTFS, ext2 or can I use ext4. Then should I move everything to the 3 TB and reformat the 2 TB?

I consided putting FreeBSD on my laptop first and not changing my tower but now I was thinking trying PC-BSD which my laptop would not support, but I haven't ruled out.


----------



## ad5du (Oct 5, 2014)

I want to be able to copy stuff to the drive from Linux and then switch to FreeBSD and possibly  switch back to Linux.
I have about 2 terabytes of data I don't want to loose if I switch operating systems.
I don't think FAT is a good option for a 2 or 3 TB drive unless I brake it up  in to several partiions.
NTFS is ok in Linux but a little bit of a cpu hog but tolerable. I don't know how it will be in FreeBSD.
I wish ext4 read-write was available on both.

I may just try FreeBSD on my laptop for a while first but it is a little under powered to use as my
 primary computer and it won't run PC-BSD which is what I was thinking about doing.


----------



## Oko (Oct 5, 2014)

FAT file system best supported file system by Linux and FreeBSD. Obviously FAT is not an option for large drives. I am not sure how is NTFS support in FreeBSD (OpenBSD supports reasonably well) while Linux support for NTFS is definitely OK at least in my experience with 1 TB drives. You really have no good option. The best Linux file system is XFS the best FreeBSD file system is ZFS. They have nothing in common. EXT[2-4] are legacy Linux file systems which really have no use in outside world.


----------



## Ordoban (Oct 5, 2014)

In my experience the best way to share partitions between FreeBSD and Linux is NTFS. It is supportet well by FreeBSD, Linux and even Windows   .

Not the solution of your request, but nice to know: you can also mount UFS in Linux (read only)
`mount -r -t ufs -o ufstype=ufs2 /dev/sde2 /mnt`


----------



## uzsolt (Oct 5, 2014)

ZFS works well with both systems.


----------



## Beastie (Oct 5, 2014)

Being primitively simple, FAT32 will probably be the best (or least worst) portable filesystem you could access safely in read-write mode. Its performance is also quite good.
As far as I know, it supports volumes up to 2TB on 512-byte-per-sector disks. The maximum file size is 4GB though.
If memory serves me well, Windows is incapable of formatting 2TB volumes due to limitations of its format utility. I don't think FreeBSD's newfs_msdos(8) suffers such limitations, but you'll have to try it yourself to find out for sure.


----------



## Oko (Oct 5, 2014)

uzsolt said:
			
		

> ZFS works well with both systems.


I hope ZFS on Linux doesn't work like 9p file system from Plain 9   I waisted 2 days to get that thing working on Red Hat 6.5 before giving up and mounting my data pool from the KVM host via NFS to my KVM guests.


----------



## uzsolt (Oct 5, 2014)

Oko said:
			
		

> uzsolt said:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


I've used ZFS on Arch and on FreeBSD, common home-partition. Yes, it's only a "desktop" usage (on laptop  ), but worked for me well.


----------



## MorgothV8 (Oct 6, 2014)

Maybe: External disk which shows itself as NFS?


----------



## Nukama (Oct 6, 2014)

I have no problems with ZFS on Linux, runs quite well.

Here are my preferred solutions for external media.

ZFS:
- good for a file system with working hardware (no defect RAM [1]), otherwise you might get into big trouble 
- works on some operation systems (no Windows)
- POSIX compliant (not like FAT) 
- less good for a swappable drive, you might implement some short cuts to import and export your pool
- checksumming, compression and all the other good stuff available

NTFS:
- supported on more platforms than ZFS
- POSIX compliant (folder/files with { : * ?  "  <  > | } not accessible in Windows)


----------



## kpa (Oct 6, 2014)

Nm.


----------

