Formatting for External Hard Drive

Hy Ginsberg · 2010-10-27 19:20:00

Greetings,

I just got a Western Digital 1 Terabyte external hard drive. It comes formatted as fat32. At present it only mounts read-only; poking around leads me to believe that if I run dosfsck on it then it will be fine. But it got me thinking: do I really want it to be fat32? I'm Linux-centric enough to not mind the prospect of not being able to plug it into any Windows machines, not a problem. So would it be better to make it ext2 or ext3 or something else? Further considerations: I generally shut down by running /sbin/poweroff (I don't use a desktop enviornment, just an xmonad window manager); any idea if that will unmount the drive nicely before killing power or if I have to worry about unmounting it manually first? And also: if I make it ext3 (or ext2?) then will I have to run fsck on it every now and then, just like I do occasionally on my hard drive partitions during the boot process?

Thanks for any help.

- Hy

Edit: My mistake -- it comes formatted as NTFS. Thought they were the same thing (good thing I posted this in the "Newbie Corner"...)

Last edited by Hy Ginsberg (2010-10-27 20:59:18)

Barrucadu · 2010-10-27 19:52:39

I use NTFS for external drives which I may want to use with Windows systems - it's a nice filesystem, supports symlinks. For drives which will be used with *nix only, I tend to go for Ext4 or JFS. The obvious downside for the ext* filesystems being the fsck after every so many mounts.

Also, unless you have a strange setup which causes `poweroff` to skip the init scripts when shutting down, all partitions are unmounted.

Last edited by Barrucadu (2010-10-27 19:53:16)

BigZ · 2010-10-27 20:29:19

Hy Ginsberg wrote:

I'm Linux-centric enough to not mind the prospect of not being able to plug it into any Windows machines, not a problem.

I keep a small (~ 10 GB) FAT32 partition on all of my external drives in case I need to moves files between platforms that don't understand NTFS. Normally I put the FUSE NTFS drivers for MAC on it so it would be possible to access the data on the main partition with a MAC. For the main partition I use (you've already guessed it) NTFS, too.

For a Linux only setup, I'd use ext3 - there's no real need for the advanced feature set of ext4 in my opinion as long as you use USB (2.0), which I assume is the case.

Last edited by BigZ (2010-10-27 20:31:47)

stqn · 2010-10-27 20:33:36

I also received a new external 1TB samsung drive yesterday and have been asking me which filesystem to use.

My other external drives and data partitions use NTFS, which works fine (though I haven't compared with a Linux FS yet.) The only problem that I can see, besides reports that NTFS might be slower than ext4, is that data may fragment over time and there is no NTFS defragmenter for Linux.

ext4 is supposed to be faster than ext3 (especially for big files) and fragment less, and I don't use Windows anymore, and I want to try something new, so I'm going for it. Regarding the fsck problem, I read a comment by a kernel dev whose name I forgot how to write that you could use LVM to make a snapshot and then fsck the snapshot, which eliminates the wait at mount time... ext4's fscks are supposed to be much faster than ext3's though.

My problem now is finding how to create a partition that starts at offset 64 and not 63 or 2048 like gparted wants me to!

Mr.Elendig · 2010-10-27 20:35:46

Use ntfs if you need to access it from windows, ext4 if you don't. That's my suggestions anyway.

Hy Ginsberg · 2010-10-27 20:49:58

stqn wrote:

My problem now is finding how to create a partition that starts at offset 64 and not 63 or 2048 like gparted wants me to!

Maybe I'm over my head -- I had assumed I could just use gparted and format it as whatever file system I wanted. Why would I have to be concerned about the starting offset?

Last edited by Hy Ginsberg (2010-10-27 20:50:50)

stqn · 2010-10-27 20:57:05

Hy Ginsberg wrote:

Why would I have to be concerned about the starting offset?

At least some of the 1TB and bigger drives have 4kB sectors instead of 512B sectors, but they still report having 512B sectors for compatibility reasons. If the partitions are not aligned to 4kB though, the disk accesses will be noticeably slower.

As a default, the latest gparted aligns partitions to 1MiB boundaries, which should be fine as far as speed is concerned. However I don't like wasting disk space, even if it's only a couple of MB!

Arch Linux

#1 2010-10-27 19:20:00

Formatting for External Hard Drive

#2 2010-10-27 19:52:39

Re: Formatting for External Hard Drive

#3 2010-10-27 20:29:19

Re: Formatting for External Hard Drive

#4 2010-10-27 20:33:36

Re: Formatting for External Hard Drive

#5 2010-10-27 20:35:46

Re: Formatting for External Hard Drive

#6 2010-10-27 20:49:58

Re: Formatting for External Hard Drive

#7 2010-10-27 20:57:05

Re: Formatting for External Hard Drive

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