Almost a year ago I wrote about my new computer with lots of ram and testing of various Linux distros then available on it. Since Vista was also installed on the machine, I compared the experience with that to running Linux. See the link off the index page for this dir.
I noted before that I had some favorite Windows apps and that these were better than the corresponding Linux apps. I was in the meantime able to get wine configured and run some of those under Ubuntu. I recall that there is also another DOS emulation, dosemu, that I may have been able to get some other favorite apps running. Of these Celestia 1.5 runs better under wine than either package for Ubuntu and it is more fully configured on the Windows side.
I knew last year that NTFS, the filesystem for Windows was supported for read/write under Linux. Just a year or two before you could mount an NTFS partition but not write to it using Linux. Since then the situation has reversed considerable, not only can you write to it but there is a program available from the Ubuntu site that installs Ubuntu inside a NTFS filesystem running Windows but in an ordinary subdirectory. What it does is to download the complete distro, in my case it us Ubuntu 9.10 and edit the grub bootloader to either boot Vista or Linux and to chroot to the install subdirectory. This is cleaver, but unless there is a way to mount the Windows root through a loopback, the rest of the Windows partition is hidden from the Linux install. The upside is that you delete the Linux directory from within Windows to remove it. I also have Cygwin installed inside the Windows partition, so I have UNIX functionality any way.
This is not about journaling or raiding NTFS on Linux, in fact the 1.5 TB Western Digital My Book USB disk I bought has gotten bad reviews because it doesn't perform well as a live active filesystem, but as more of a secondary storage device not requiring time critical availability it works fine. One has to simply adjust one's use of the device to take advantage of its strengths. It is formatted NTFS, it can be formatted for a Mac, HFS, but as far as I know it is not supported on Linux, nor has it been demonstrated that it does EXT at all, so I left it NTFS. A gotcha is that it only does nouid so it mounts with security all but disabled. This is not a problem for me because the system is behind two private networks, another reason I am here. The My Book is good enough to take files off my main drive and even to unarchive zip and tar files. The main problem with it seems to be that it is slow to become usable when its USB port has been quiet. The OS says it is mounted, but there is latency in actually seeing it.
Another problem is that if the NTFS becomes corrupted, it gets remounted read-only and Linux can't repair it, the best fix is the reboot into Vista which will usually fix the FS, or need an fscheck, which happened to me only twice. I have not had problems with it recently save being patient with its slow wake up.