Better ways to format USB disks (file fomats etc)

[Andreas Tunek]

I bought a new shiny red 500 GB USB HDD recently in order to back up
large files (mostly video but other stuff as well). My previous HDDs I
formatted as fat32 since that can be read and written by most devices
(PS3, Windows, Mac etc). Since I would only use this new HDD with my
different computers running fedora  I thought I could use a more
modern file system like ext3 or ext4. This would allow me to have
larger files (and also maybe better performance). However, I would
like to have the extremely high usability/minimal security of fat32
(anyone who mounts the disk can read and write everything on the disk)
and it seems that this is not possible using ext3/ext4. So I ended up
using ntfs.....

I feel this is a bit of loss for free software in general and fedora
in particular and I hope something could be done at the situation. So
I have the following questions:

1: Are there already ways to do what I want and I have just missed it?

2: Are there any others who have this need or am I just weird. Do
people really need permissions on all their disk or is it more
convenient if some disks are totally open? If I am the only one who
wants this there is no need to do any work.

3: What can be done? Do we need to create a "Permissionless ext4" or
are there any simpler options? Could we maybe make an option to set
all mounted USB drives so that all users can write and read anything
on them? Or are the any better ways to achive what I want?

Best regards
Andreas Tunek