Is it a good idea to keep NTFS hard drives installed on my Linux system?

[MuffD]

I have Suse 9.2 pro installed and was wondering if it's safe to keep my NTFS hard drives installed so I can use this as my file server. In Linux, I can share directories from the NTFS drives and it seems okay but don't really know if this is a good idea. I would like to ideally keep this as a standalone server that will rarely be used. Just host my apps, mp3s, photos, etc....

Any suggestions? I'm moving soon and would like to migrate from the Windows Server family.


Thanks in advance.

 

[Crusty]

I wouldn't keep using the NTFS to file serve. Reading from NTFS is perfectly stable, but writing can be iffy sometimes. I would try to migrate to a native Linux filesystem like ext3, xfs, jfs as soon as possible.

 

[MuffD]

Should I just back everything up to another hd then convert to the file system you mentioned?
The only thing that will be writing to this linux box will be other windows machines.

Thanks

 

[Crusty]

Even if they are other Windows machines writing to the box, it is still the Linux NTFS driver that is performing the writes to the hard drive. Windows will see the shares over the smb protocol, not as actual NTFS drives.

Yeah, best would be backup, adjust partitions then initialize the partition with a new filesystem. I would suggest going with ext3, it's mature and all around will perform decently. You can search this forum and look for some posts by drag and n0cmonkey I believe. They both went into detail about the differences of the Linux filesystems and which ones perform better under certain conditions. Going with ext3 you will safe all around though.

 

[MuffD]

Sweet. I'll do some searching. I still have a few months to learn this before I move.

Thanks again!

 

[Nothinman]

Reading from NTFS is perfectly stable, but writing can be iffy sometimes

Writing is impossible unless you install Captive-NTFS or go into the Linux NTFS driver and explicitly enable it at compile time.

The only thing that will be writing to this linux box will be other windows machines.

Nothing will be writing to that filesystem as long as it's NTFS in a Linux box.

Should I just back everything up to another hd then convert to the file system you mentioned?

Something like Partition Magic might be able to do a conversion to ext3 on the fly, but I wouldn't trust it.