# Which filesystem for external drive?



## demo (Aug 13, 2010)

Hi, i have a 500GB LaCiE external hard-drive, i bought it for the purpose of storing my music, photos, movies etc. I tend to distro hop/re-install fairly often. Its connected by usb and is detected etc.

My drive is currently formatted as ext4, and refuses to mount under FreeBSD, which isn't a problem, i can backup the stuff and reformat it... but the problem is choosing a suitable filesystem.

Which filesystem, would be appropriate to use for both a Linux and FreeBSD host?
I don't want to use ntfs, for personal reasons. And Fat-32's file size limit isn't ideal.

The drive needs read and write support under both Linux/FreeBSD. Any ideas? :stud


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## vermaden (Aug 13, 2010)

I mostly use FAT32 for that purpose, its the most 'portable' sollution for an external USB drive, Windows/Linux/Mac OSX/BSDs have built in support for it, with ext2 You will have to add that support to Windows and OS X, with NTFS You would have to add it to Linux/BSDs/OSX with fuse, it also depends how portable You want this drive to be, it its gonna stand right beside You box always attached to it, then You do not need portability, but if You would want to have this drive 'working' with every OS, FAT32 is the best way.


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## demo (Sep 16, 2010)

Ok seems like its been a while, but i finally got round to doing this, formatted my drive to FAT32. I have a problem with read/write though.

Just to clarify in case "large" is part of the problem:

```
$ sudo mount -t msdosfs /dev/da0s1 /mnt/fat32/
mount_msdosfs: /dev/da0s1: Disk too big, try '-o large' mount option: Invalid argument
```

I can successfully mount my drive using:

```
$ sudo mount -t msdosfs -o large /dev/da0s1 /mnt/fat32/
```

However i am stuck with read-only support. How can i go about mounting it so i can write to the disk?



```
$ uname -a
FreeBSD freya 8.1-RELEASE FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE #0: Mon Jul 19 02:36:49 UTC 2010
     root@mason.cse.buffalo.edu:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC  amd64
$ df -h /dev/da0s1   
Filesystem    Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/da0s1    466G     86G    380G    18%    /mnt/fat32
```

If need anymore info to help solve this, just ask.
Thanks


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## Beastie (Sep 16, 2010)

/etc/sysctl.conf:

```
vfs.usermount=1
```
`# sysctl vfs.usermount=1`

Add yourself to the operator group:
`# pw group mod operator -m demo`

/etc/rc.conf:

```
devfs_system_ruleset="localrules"
```
/etc/devfs.rules:

```
[localrules=5]
add path 'da*' mode 0660 group operator
```
Restart devfs:
`# /etc/rc.d/devfs restart`

Create a mountpoint in your home directory:
`% mkdir ~/mnt`

Now you can mount R/W and without sudo:
`% mount -t msdosfs -o large,longnames /dev/da0s1 ~/mnt`


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