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On my new PC I want to install both Linux and Windows, each on their own rather small partition, and put the big rest of the 1 TB HDD in a further partition (plus swap). Which filesystem should I use? My thoughts:

  • NTFS. Linux has write support, but I noticed on my external HDD a huge performance drop when only a few GB (of 500 GB) were left free - suddenly a few hundred MB took half an hour to copy... Any ideas why? Also no file permissions with Linux, although that is not 100% necessary but would be a bonus
  • fat32. Too old, won't support that partition size anyway
  • ext3. Windows can read for example via ext2ifs, but what about good write support? I'd even consider a small virtual machine with a tiny Linux installation to only provide a NFS share to its host windows (probably qemu, distro recommendation are appreciated)
  • ext4. I lack the experience with it...

It looks lke NTFS is the way to go for now (just as it was two years ago), but I'd prefer a less proprietary solution.

Jeff Schaller
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Tobias Kienzler
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3 Answers3

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If you run coLinux on Windows (through the andLinux distribution or otherwise), you can use it to access any filesystem that Linux supports.

Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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If you don't mind running a VM. You could use it to share your partition via samba (simpler in Windows then NFS)

Gert
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I use an ext3 partition with ext2ifs and it works fine for reading and writing.

Christian
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