RPi - Which format for HDD?

I’ve a 160Gb 2.5" HDD in an enclosure with a dual USB connection. I’m connecting it to a raspberry pi through a powered hub to ensure adequate power. Using both RISC Pi and raspbian OSs. What format should I use for the drive? FAT32?

I’m surprised at the lack of comment on my HDD question. I’ve imaged raspbian and fedora remix to go with my RISC OS pi card from ROOL (waiting for my Nut pi as well)

Picked up this item, new, for $AU50. The Seagate USB3 500Gb HDD is seen and accessible straight up using fedora remix for the RPi – when I started up, with the drive connected, fedora displayed an icon for the drive, described it as Seagate and allowed me to open it. Once open it had a number of directories and files pre-installed.

My experience with raspbian on the other hand was not a success. RISC OS pi has also baulked with an error message telling me that it doesn’t recognise ‘this DOS format’ – is there still a size limit on the HDD that RISC OS can access/read?!?!

FAT32 would be the preferred format for both to access. As for the 500Gb drive, under Fedora, if you can find out the properties for the drive it maybe formatted to NTFS which some flavours of Linux can access but not RISC OS. If so, backup any/all files to a seperate drive and format the drive as FAT32 and transfer the files across.

Thanks for that advice Peter. I thought that was the case but wanted to double check that I was doing the correct thing.