I just bought a new 500GB external harddrive. Most of the time I only store operating system ISO's on those things and some movies. Large files anyway, well over 4GiB sometimes, so FAT is out of the question.
So, I'm left wondering. My old external harddrive was NTFS formatted, because it had to be able to connect to Windows boxen sometimes. This new harddrive will not have that requirement. Would NTFS still be the best option? Would one of the ext{2,3,4} filesystems be a good choice for a removable disk? Are there filesystems that I am unaware of that would fit the bill?
"The bill" here would be a stable filesystem that is able to survive an unclean disconnection, is quick, can handle files of over 4GiB and is able to be used on at least kernels 2.6.28 and up.
Update: I hadn't taken xfs into account, and it's large filesystem support is interesting. I'll take a look at the operating systems / kernels I am using (RHEL5, CentOS5, Ubuntu 9.04 and 8.04, Fedora11) to see if those kernels support xfs. I think I remember some of them (the distros) not supporting it by default, but then again, maybe I'm mistaking jfs for xfs here.
The sync option too, is interesting, but that would mean creating UDEV rules for this device on all of my machines, which is not a huge problem, but still something I'll have to keep in mind.
Finally, taken xfs and the sync option, I'm wondering whether the performance gain for xfs and the performance hit with the sync option would be noticeable over the – still rather limited – USB interface.
Best Answer
Personally I use XFS all over the place (and it sound like that's for personal use).
On an administrational decision it's not that important regarding size, with a 500GB disk you are nowhere near the limits of any filesystem (except FAT as David Schmitt pointed out). Do not consider NTFS, it may have read support but using NTFS under linux is just plain wrong.
I'd still stay with ext3 is is well tested and has the largst toolset available in case someting happens to your data.