Free software for making ext 3 drives on windows

[Carsten]

As far as I know, MiniTool Partition Wizard free chooses inode size 128 per default for ext2 and ext3 filesystems. That is probably simply for compatibility reasons. It was the default inode size when ext2 and ext3 were dominating, and it is compatible with common (early) ext-drivers for other operating systems. Some of them (e.g. Ext2Fsd) now do support larger inode sizes, but, again, compatibility.

I have, essentially given up on ext2/3, except for some rare cases. I need ext2/3 for direct local server exports on our Sony, but I have other means to access content from it's RAID. NTFS and network/FTP is all I need for daily transfer work also to colleagues. When someone/festivals require ext2/ext3 explicitly, I use DCP-o-matic disk writer. Sometimes I ingest a DCP from an NTFS drive onto our Sony for final testing, then export it from there to an ext3 formatted drive (very fast on our Sony).

I used to use GPARTED, but, especially with larger discs (>500GByte) connected through USB, filesystem creation/formatting has grown so painfully slow (writing inode tables can take a day or so). Never found a solution to that problem, although there's loads of similar issues reported on the net. And I do already limit myself to 2TB discs anyway.


One reason for me to use NTFS is that I can create a DCP directly onto the NTFS drive on my very fast windows DCP-o-matic machine, the hash check, etc. is performed on the original, and I can ingest from that drive without another intermediate transfer. I would never let DCP-o-matic create and check a DCP on an ext2/3 drive through e.g. Ext2Fsd in windows. I can also create/write NTFS drives on my Mac (Tuxera) safely and fast, while ext2/3 drivers on OS X now are a pain in the arse.

- Carsten

[IoannisSyrogiannis]

Yep. It was the original size up until the appearance of EXT4, where it doubled.
Quite a few drives formatted during the last decade (or a bit more) on linux systems (mke2fs) with the -I setting on default (omitted) would be 256 though. Especially the closer we get to January 20th of 2038. As exceptions, stand filesystems smaller than 512 megabytes.
It is interesting, if MiniTool Partition Wizard is creating by default EXT2/3 partitions with that inode size, but convenient for formatting DCP drives according to standards.