[plug] FireWire Hard Drive Question

[James Devenish]

Hi Brock,

In message <411DADED.6070502 at iinet.net.au>
on Sat, Aug 14, 2004 at 02:15:09PM +0800, Brock Woolf wrote:
> Is the hard drive read [by] the OS as a hard drive with a
> Fat32/HFS/Ext3 partition? In which case I could not use it
> on my Mac if it was formatted Ext3.

You are correct that although the FireWire drive itself would be
portable, the partition tables and filesystems are the defining factors
for compatibility. If you are able to format the drive using a PC-style
partition table, then all of Mac/Windows/Linux should be able to read
it <-- this was a dubiously-educated guess, hopefully someone else will
set the record straight.

Filesystems might be more tricky. You'd hope it would be easy, but
really filesystems are designed to be tied closely to the hardware and
kernel of the operating system. This means, for instance, that FreeBSD
and Solaris would each use filesystems tailored for /their/ kernels, and
would not be portable to each other.

The initial choices for filesystems that come to mind are HFS+, ext2/3,
UFS, NTFS, FAT32 (or whatever it is that Windows uses).

I know that Linux read and write HFS (Mac) partitions, but you might not
have the same luck with HFS+. If you can't use HFS+, then you will
probably lose UNIX permissions :-( The advantage of HFS+ is that it is
the best bet for giving you the "best of both worlds" with Mac and
Linux.

Alternatively, if you can find read/write Mac OS X kernel modules for
ext2/ext3, then I suggest that you chose this path. This will give you
'UNIX' but not so much 'Mac'. There is also UFS, but although I imagine
that both Linux and Mac OS X will claim to read/write UFS filesystems,
they might not agree on their definitions of UFS! (You'd probably have
to hope that Linux is flexible to support Darwin's UFS.)

Truthfully, the "lowest common denominator" is probably FAT32 Windows
filesystems. This will work 'everywhere'. The trouble, of course, is
that you will lose both UNIX-isms and Mac-isms. Don't forget that you
need read/write capability, not just read capability, so the choice of
NTFS is probably unrealistic. I do not know the relative merits of
different Windows filesystems -- I am just making speculation based on
what I have read on this list :-P