Anyone use exFat with Raid setups?

[Priddle]

Hello all

New to the forum. I just went through 40+ pages of the 10TB+ thread and was amazed and saw some interesting ideas to say the least.

I have a couple of questions. I have a desktop that serves as my HTPC as well that runs XBMC for Windows. I have 2 1TB drives in a RAID1 setup for my OS (WinXP 32bit) and other files. I also have a single 2TB drive for all my media for XBMC. The array and single drive are backed up to 1TB and 2TB external drives respectively.

My media drive is 3/4 full and no signs of freeing space. I was debating a RAID enclosure such as a TowerRaid from Sans Digital (hardware RAID) with 5 bays. I'd have a RAID5 with 5 2TB drives for 8TB total.

Then I was thinking of a bigger case to hold all these drives and let my Asus P5Q Pro handle 4 2TB drives to give me 6TB total on RAID5 and use a RAID cage to hold the drives.

But all of the above is neither here nor there if WinXP can't recognize the uninitialized drive. I have read XP 32bit can not create volumes over 2TB. So for a 6TB drive, I could make 3 partitions. Is that correct? I really don't want to upgrade my OS as everything is setup the way I want it and working fine. Why mess with something that is not broken.

Secondly, I have the exFat update installed but I haven't tried it yet. I don't have the extra drives. This is suppose to allow XP to read/write to volumes greater than 2TB. I can not find a real life example of someone doing this on a large RAID array. Would exFat work here?

I found this post where someone was using the same OS and had extremely large arrays built. He doesn't say what or how many volumes he had or how he formatted them
http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1033779685&postcount=45

I'm pretty much googled out but came across this forum in my surfing. I give it a 2 thumbs up for sure.

Thanks

 

[keenan]

exFAT gets around the 2GB/file limit of FAT32. I don't think it allows > 2TB volumes as that is a partitioning problem, not a fileystem problem.

I wouldn't use exFAT for anything. It's as proprietary as NTFS, but inferior in every way.

 

[dustNbone]

Agreed. Another hack on FAT, one of a long line. The first being in 1987 when it was hacked to support hard disk partitions larger than 15MB and 1.2MB "high density" floppies. I think FAT is about the worst filesystem still in use, it provides pretty much zero protection. Performance could be pretty good in certain instances because of it's simplicity, but not worth it in any way. If you must use an MS filesystem, use NTFS. It's actually a pretty good filesystem, biggest fault is the fact that it's proprietary.

Dustin

 

[Priddle]

Thanks for the replies. After further reading I learned exFat is for removable drives only and XP will only allow exFat on those devices. So I'll have to scratch that plan anyway.

My only 2 options now are upgrade to Win7 or have multiple partitions across a 6 or 8TB array, whichever I decide.

 

[Blue Fox]

If you use 4k blocks, you can create a partition up to 16tb in Windows XP.

 

[alphakry]

I started looking into this as well.

So NTFS is still the only file system worth running for a large storage box using Windows?

I was under the impression exFAT was targeted as an NTFS improvement, not FAT.
Wasn't it created to focus on improving the large overhead and easy fragmentation that plagues NTFS?

 

[jonnyjl]

I was under the impression exFAT was targeted as an NTFS improvement, not FAT.
Wasn't it created to focus on improving the large overhead and easy fragmentation that plagues NTFS?

No.

ExFat's purpose is to replace FAT, and the only reason FAT(32) stays around is for portable storage (Flash Memory/Phones/MP3 Players/Thumb drives) since its one of the most universally supported file systems. The main problem with FAT32 is its per file size limitation. I don't know about other folks, but I have plenty of files over 4GB.

The problem is Microsoft is making this proprietary... has any of the *nix OSes adopted support for it? I know OSX put support in for it recently..., but I don't know if any Linux variants have.

We seriously need a replacement for FAT that all devices/OSes will adopt.

I wonder if UDF could be adopted. I know its for Optical Media, but I wonder if its there's any technical barrier to it being used on a solid state media/hard drives.