What filesystems are recommended for using with Ardour?
I ask because I would like to add a large disk that I can seamlessly read-write access from Linux and Windows (dual boot machine) and I’d like it to operate efficiently for Ardour 
Does anyone have first hand experience of ext3 drivers for Windows (XP)? If these are all good and recommended then that may be the best solution…
thanks,
Rua HM.
well If you are going to use large disks I’ve allays read ext3 over ext2, as ext3 is journaled and that will save some headaches with fsck and data corruption. as for drivers for windows, to my knowledge there are only ext2 drivers, but since ext3 is backwards compatible it’ll work just fine, and has for me for some years.
Thanks for the tip, and the report that you’ve been using ext3 with Win ext2 drivers with success for some time.
I have recieved other advice that NTFS is fairly well supported (i.e. rw) on the Linux side, which would make it a good option too (with the advantage of not having to install any new drivers).
I read that you can’t defrag ext2/3 and this is somewhat of a problem, whereas NTFS can be defragged with ease on the windows side, so I may go in that direction…
Forum readers feel free to weigh in with your comments and experiences as I really don’t know much about filesystem stuff
thanks
Hi,
there are a lot of opinions about filesystems out there.
Just what I know: To read NTFS filesystems is supported in linux. I worked with it and it’s ok. But write support is still considered experimental by the kernel developers, so I wouldn’t rely on it at all.
Ext2/3 don’t have to be defragged, simply because they are good filesystems and hardly get fragmented (or only negligible). There may be other opinions, but don’t worry too much about it
About 6 months before I also worked with MS Windows and Linux. I created a “share” partition with fat32. It worked, but fat32 is painful (above all painfully slow) in my experience.
If you really plan to work for a long time with these dual boot configuration (and don’t switch completely to linux like I did), I’d try this ext3 driver for MS Windows.
Benjamin
I have been using fs-driver for 2 years now without a glitch so I would recommand this solution too