Best filesystem for use with multiple OS?

Question

what's the best file system to use with windows, osx, and linux that is not fat32. I need a file system that can share large video files with good performance

Solution 1

Your best bet would be NTFS as it's rather painful to install drivers under Windows for other filesystems.

Now Linux and OSX can write on NTFS filesystem. Most Linux distributions now comes with ntfs-3g which is available for OSX. As far as I remember, starting from Snow Leopard, OSX even has built-in NTFS write support.

---

EDIT: my answer addresses the title of your question "best filesystem for use with mutilple os"

However the body of the question can be understood in a different way? Do you want to setup a server that is going to share video files across network?

In this case, I've happily used XFS (behaved well with large files) and JFS in the past before ext4 exists -- today I would just go ext4 as it's more widespread.

Then, you would share the files on the network using Samba.

Solution 2

Sadly Fat32 would be most universal, to improve performance you might want to consider using RAID striping. Although this doesn't help the poor performance associated with too many files in any one directory.

Solution 3

Sorry... but there's no such thing

NTFS is usable in Linux; but certainly far from optimal (the best ones run on FUSE).

there's ext2 for windows; but needs some extensions and configurations.

Comments

[MarcH]

superuser.com/questions/39942/using-udf-on-a-usb-flash-drive

[JPScerri]

FAT32 has a 4GB limit on file size, not the best for large video files.

[JPScerri]

I agree, NTFS is the best bet.