Spaced Out ::

Three years ago I blogged about using FAT32 beyond the 32Gb limit to format large external drives. The rationale for this was to have an disk file system that worked across operating systems and didn’t run in to the complete drag that is NTFS file permissions.

Well step forward three years and my 500Gb drive is starting to be (very) full and needed upping to 1Tb. That and my increasing need for security meant going in search of something more secure for my external drive - the iStorage diskAshur fitted the bill perfectly with a keypad locked drive, real-time Hardware encryption (256-bit AES) and some shock protection. Great bit of kit and only a little pricier. But…. what file system to have??

Well the reason for moving on from FAT32 was the limit to maximum filesize (4Gb) which is easily exceeded with satellite imagery or virtual machines. NTFS, as I note above, is just painful for file permissions and isn’t really needed for an external drive which has hardware encryption. Well, as it turns out the answer was staring me in the face - exFAT which is essentially FAT64. OK, so its a proprietary Microsoft file system, but solves the filesize limit, is relatively simple and fast, ideally suited to external media and particularly flash drives, but perfectly suited to this use. Compatible with add-ons to Windows XP and MacOS, whilst there appears to be driver support for Linux. Given 99.9% of the time I move between Windows systems that suits me.

So, 500Gb of data transfer later I now have an operational drive. Just got to move the other backup disk from 500Gb to 1Tb…