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arjun1296

Member

Registered: 2011-10-05

Posts: 3

Choice of the best file-system for portable hard drive

Hi,
I recently bought Seagate GoFlex FreeAgent Desk 2TB 3.5inch [ ] hard-disk. USB 2.0 [:( ].

I would like to know the best file system to which should I really format my drive to. I usually use ext2 for my pen drives.
* Is there any added advantage using btrfs over ext4 ? My use is to store books of size (usually <20 MB ). Separate partition for movies and tv-series ( 300MB < avg-size < 4GB) and tutorials (size <100MB) and lecture videos (size <350MB)

Can anyone please enlighten me on the subject and how to tweak the tuning parameters of the filesystem to get the maximum space, lifetime for my hard disk?

Thanks in advance.
PS: Values in the bracket is the usual range of a *single* file size.

oboedad55

Member

From: Baku

Registered: 2011-04-05

Posts: 392

Re: Choice of the best file-system for portable hard drive

What are you going to use the drive for? Does it need to be accessible to Windows? Unless btrfs now has fsck I can't recommend it. I had to do a hard reset on a btrfs machine and the filesystem got hosed. OTOH, ext4 has been bulletproof. So if the drive needs to be used with Windows go with ntfs. Otherwise, I'd say ext4.

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PythonEater

Member

From: Kentucky, USA

Registered: 2010-08-19

Posts: 34

Re: Choice of the best file-system for portable hard drive

I'd suggest the same. NTFS support under Linux is pretty good now days. Just make sure you install ntfs-3g if you do decide to go with NTFS.

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satanselbow

Member

Registered: 2011-06-15

Posts: 538

Re: Choice of the best file-system for portable hard drive

This is a pretty regular question and the forum does have a excellent search facility...

NTFS if you are going to use it with windows or take it somewhere that might be windows specific... ext3/4 if you are certain it will be used under linux exclusively... there are excellent wiki articles detailing the merits of the various fs options available to you :$

graysky

Wiki Maintainer

From: :wq

Registered: 2008-12-01

Posts: 10,643

Website

Re: Choice of the best file-system for portable hard drive

+1 for frequently asked question

@satanelbow - Why would anyone want to use ext3 at all these days?

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fukawi2

Ex-Administratorino

From: .vic.au

Registered: 2007-09-28

Posts: 6,229

Website

Re: Choice of the best file-system for portable hard drive

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=126136

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arjun1296

Member

Registered: 2011-10-05

Posts: 3

Re: Choice of the best file-system for portable hard drive

Mainly its for primary backup.
I am intending to use ext4 for the drives. And planning to make a "misc" to mount to windows based systems apprx 250GB for FAT rather than NTFS. I think ntfs-3g will be a bad choice as the module is a FUSE causes slow read/write[in *NIX] but works well in Windows. And FAT has kernel support.

Gusar

Member

Registered: 2009-08-25

Posts: 3,605

Re: Choice of the best file-system for portable hard drive

Don't let the fact that ntfs-3g is a userspace driver bother you, it's plenty fast. I wouldn't use FAT for large amounts of storage.

@graysky: My external drive is ext3. Mainly because there was no ext4 yet when I bought it, but also because there's a working ext3 driver for Windows. It's not a bad choice, it's been the Linux default for many, many years.