Or in case you insist on a journaling filesystem, ext3. That's not something you could say about ext4. It's not bulletproof either, but there's one big advantage - there's plenty of windows software for it and it works, read&write. Danger of it getting stolen, soaked with water after you get caught by rain, or falling from 4th floor makes the filesystem choice kind of insignificant, at least when it comes down to security By the way, when you actually do have to carry over files bigger than 4GB, then there's nothing easier than to pack it into several smaller files.Īnother option you didn't mention would be ext3. Reliability is reasonable, and let's face it, that's enough when talking about an external drive. Its performance is not great, but hey, you're gonna access it mostly via usb2 anyway. If he's not connected to the internet and you forgot your usb pen drive with drivers at home, then you got a nice and expensive paperweight.įAT32, on the other hand, you'll be able to mount on anything, anywhere. Of course on your own windows PC you can have some software installed that will allow you to use ext4 (in which case forget about performance, there will be none), but think about how difficult it will be to use it on anything else, e.g. It's not THE best in any scenario I can imagine for an external drive, because you get neither best compatibility, reliability nor performance.Įxt4 is obvioulsy the best option when it comes to performance, but it won't work "out of the box" on windows machines, so that's it for me. I'd take NTFS completely out of the question. The main advantage is that having ntfs, the disk turns "cross-platform".ĮXT4: I imagine that this is the best alternative because it's supposed to have the best performance, but it's big issue, is that lacks the capability to use on windows (in case I need to move something to another machine).ĭoes anybody have any experience with this and can share it? I also pretend to use a backup system, rsync, backintime or something like that. NTFS: Not "native", but in my experience writing in a ntfs is quite secure and you shouldn't be afraid to do it. Honestly, I don't have that kind of file too often, so it's not really a big problem.
I'd like to try another distros on it and even other os's (tempted to play with BSDs), but I'm not sure if the performance it's going to be too flawed because it's accessing through usb2 (bonus question).įAT32: The main problem is the limit of 4GiB per file and that it gets fragmented "easily". Tha main use that I'm gonna give it, is as a backup disk. To give a context, my laptop just have arch linux, no other os's. I want to format it now, but I'm not sure which filesystem would be a better idea. I just got an external 1TB HDD (usb3 capable, but my laptop doesnt D:).
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