Buffalo Forums

   

I have a Linkstation Pro Duo (LS-WTGL/R1 Firmware 3.09) has a WD 500GB MyBook attached as USBDisk1.

 

I can read but not write to the USB attached drive. If I use Windows Explorer both the Linkstation and USB drive appear to be NTFS. But if I look through the Buffalo NASNavigator the Linkstation is XFS filesysten and the USB drive is listed as FAT.

 

Apparently, I am supposed to use the Buffalo software to reformat the USB drive as XFS?

 

If I do that I fear that the backups on the USB drive will only be readable from the Linkstation. For me, the whole point of making the backup is that if the Linkstation fails I want easy access to the backup USB drive.

 

So, is can Windows XP Pro and/or Vista read a USB drive with an XFS formatted drive?

 

Thanks for you help in advance.

XFS will give you the best backup performance, but as it is a Linux filesystem, is not natively readable by Windows. FAT32 can be used as a backup destination, but is limited to files smaller than 4GB, and is a poor performer. Ext3 is a good middle option; while it is not natively readable by Windows and does not perform as well as XFS, ext3 can be read on Windows by using a program such as ext2fsd or ext2ifs.

   

I thought I saw a reference to a program called UFS that would read XFS from within Windows - are you familiar with that software?

 

If so, that would make XFS a good option.

 

Thanks,

L Bo

I'm fairly certain UFS Explorer can read XFS, but I didn't mention it because it's not free software... but it is reasonably cheap (50) considering it's the only program that I know of that can read XFS in windows.