What is the best format for an external hard drive?

[Alirez]

I've been having some trouble finding the right format for my external hard drive (Seagate Expansion Desktop Drive).

It will primarily be used in linux, but is a shared lab hard drive and is preferable for saved data to be accessed by multiple platforms (at least linux and mac, but windows would also be very useful). The current format I have set does not handle my large fq files, even when gzipped.

Is anyone aware of a good format to use? And what tools I would need to use to set this?

Thanks

[GenoMax]

Moving an external harddrive between all three main OS flavors sounds like inviting trouble. Even in UK hard drives must have become inexpensive enough that you can consider getting multiple.

That said, here is a nice recap of various options: http://www.howtogeek.com/73178/what-...-my-usb-drive/

[Richard Finney]

Try NTFS.

It's probably the easiest to support on Linux/Mac/Windows.