external hdd for win & ubu

[Witch Lady]

I'm about to buy my first external hdd. I naively though that any hdd would be ok, but then I saw that one western digital external was advertised as formatted for Windows and that it can be easily reformatted for Mac.

So now, I'm a bit lost. I use Windows/Ubuntu dualboot on my both computers.

Is any external hdd fine after all? (I want 2TB). How should I format it?

[diasf]

"Windows format" -> NTFS. You can't run linux from it, but you can use it with no problems.

(on multi-user systems that might be tricky, but for common desktop user, it's perfectly fine, I have 2 of them myself )

[Witch Lady]

Ntfs, noted. Thanks for info.

What about multibooting? I want to try multibooting in the future (rpm/debs/independent) so what kind of problems can I expect?

[diasf]

It comes formatted as NTFS. I have 2 WD elements, just plug and use.

And as long as each OS supports NTFS, you will be fine. Or if you don't have windows, then ext3 would be the choice. There are programs that add support to ext3 on windows, but IMO is better to let NTFS if you have windows around. The linux support to ntfs is way better than the windows support for ext3....

[Witch Lady]

Thanks, everything seems fine.