What's been tried so far..

[judb]

linux, which is what the phatbox runs, has to have support to read the filesystem.  The way the phatbox is set up it expects the file system to be Fat32 for both partitions on the DMS.  if they wanted to they could add NTFS support but it would increase the size of the kernel and maybe not fit in the flash rom, but I dont know for sure.

further more.. I dont really see any reason at all to add NTFS support to a device like the phatbox.. NTFS features are for servers and workstations.. logging file system, security etc are all rather pointless for an embedded music player.  and filesystem compressions doesnt really buy you anything but increased CPU usage when dealing with MP3s and the like as they dont compress much if at all.

[para]

Well, the only nice thing would be to have a journalling filesystem like ext3/xfs - which is of course a linux thing! Guess what...  

[judb]

why would you want journaling on an mp3 player?  not much gets written to disk and even if it did, its not critical that the data be intact for things like logs...  journaling creates additional disk I/O and in an embedded system you want to get rid of extra things like that because it means CPU overhead which might cause skippy audio.  

and for the guess what im either going to say that since the kernel has EXT2 support to mount the ramdisk that means it has EXT3 maybe depending on the kernel build out... or that you have finished your software initial release, or you were going to say chicken butt...

[para]

You're right, ext3 doesn't make that much sense although I always like to have my fs consistent even in case of the drive being pulled out of the box or some kinda power-failure...
However, the biggest advantage for Linux users is the better syncing! Have you ever tried to do a clean sync between a unix filesystem and vfat/fat32. It really sucks! Using a case-sensitive, timestamp-using filesystem on both sides makes it lot easier - thumbs up! And yes, there's ext3 support available

Para