I’m on a roll today for breaking things. First, I dropped my glass lunch box today…And then, I dropped my media drive I was using because I realized I had not copied all the files on it to a backup drive, and now it’s toast.
So I ended up buying a 12 TB dual drive Raid 1 box without NAS. Did not enjoy forking over $450, but oh well.
The question is, if I plan on using this to store large media files (videos,etc), what’s the best partition format I should be using so that I can read AND write from a mac, windows, and linux?
The issues are
NTFS is read/writeable on windows and linux, but read only on Mac unless you install a driver or use an unsupported OSX feature
EXT3/4 is read/writeable on linux, but not read/writeable on mac or windows, without a third party driver
HFS is read/writeable on mac, but generally not writeable on linux of windows, if you’re using journaled.
That leaves FAT32 (which has a file size limit) and exFAT, which I think is supported on linux…..But a weird partition format.
Ok. Went with exFat for now…. Seems to be the most compatible without the FAT32 file size limit of 4gb…Cool.
Ended up getting a Western Digital 12TB Duo, for now…
Total damage, $490 after tax.
But I’m also a shareholder, so , I’m contributing to its bottomline.
While I’m at it, I think I’m going to be building media drive so I’m think I’m going to get this and drop my old drives in there as a networked media drive.
I would tend to use a method similar to what spdrun suggested. Run a Linux box, ext4 file system, and Samba it. I have benchmarked Windows filesystems and they aren’t pretty. When MSFT was trying to demonstrate that they were as fast on web servers as most LAMP systems, I looked at what was behind the specs. What was happening was that the drive was being shadowed into RAM and the Windows system was web-serving off the RAM image.
Another thing to consider is what type of access control/permission schema you are considering. Windows/OSX/Linux use different mechanisms.
It turns out that a Raspberry PI can be used as a Linux based file server, as can a cheap notebook with a decent Ethernet interface (use one of the old ones that is not really being used and Linux it).
With the Nighthawk, I think there are only two levels of shared file permissions. Guest and Admin. (I have a NetGear WiFi w/ file sharing. I don’t know if this is enough for what is wanted. The sharing is also a ‘web’ type vs a mounted filesystem.
[quote=moneymaker]Unless you are hardwired into the NAS it could be slow at backing things up, other than that not a bad way to go.[/quote]
Depends upon the WiFi and what the surrounding signal interference looks like. The one I am using has a combined 1.3Gbit transfer capability – so no problem. If allowing NAS across WiFi, might want to have a WiFi that has a separate set of ‘guest’ bands that do not talk to ‘home network’ equipment but instead only talks out to WAN/Cable.
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