i have a 500GB USB2 drive. i use it to back up things. When i first got it, the nice folks at the factory formatted it as a FAT32 device. While that's great if you want something brain dead simple and portable to any configuration, it sucks because you're limited to files no bigger than 2GB, (So much for storing DVD ISOs there kids.) and you lose a horrific amount of overhead to the file system.
So i reformatted it as NTFS, which got me a system that's mountable on most OS's and lets me install things like my backup of various live DVDs. i've got. All was reasonably well with the world. Well, until i hotswapped the drive without properly unmounting it under Windows and NTFS-3G on Linux bitched that it wouldn't mount the drive. Considering that two of my workhorse boxes are running Linux, and this was one hell of a sneaker between them, that got really annoying really fast. Plus, it seemed odd to me to have an NTFS drive living under Linux.
So i reformatted it as ext3.
(This was a bit harder than i thought since qtparted kept choking on the commands for some reason. Fortunately,
sudo parted /dev/sdi1 mkfs ext3
sudo parted /dev/sdi1 name 1 500G
worked just fine.)
i even found a spiffy windows based ext3 driver that lets me mount up the drive under Vista.
The one thing i noticed is that performance seems to have gotten better, even for ext3 under USB2. Probably due to some aspect of node management, but at around 27MB/s write transfers, i'm not really complaining.
