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revivaloflostart

Member

Registered: 2018-08-09

Posts: 11

Ext4 or NTFS for Hard Drive dedicated to Downloading & Storage ?

I have a few hard drives I would like to set up as storage drives and as the destination for my downloads, but was wondering if it's better to set them up as Ext4 or NTFS? 
 
I don't use Windows now, but I used to run dual boot and have experimented with setting the hard drives to Ext4 and NTFS, and for some reason, I always lose out a decent amount of space when I go Ext4. While going NTFS shows the exact size as they would appear if they were in Windows. 

I hear that with ext4, like 5% of the size will be taken away for system reserve or something? I think I've also tried setting the argument during formatting so that the system doesn't take away this 5%, but somehow that never worked for me for some reason. (Is that even recommended?)

Anyways, how do you guys usually set up your hard drives for storage/downloads?  Also, are there any options that are useful to put down while editing the fstab? I usually just go with the defaults.

kind regards

Last edited by revivaloflostart (2018-08-21 07:53:29)

ooo

Member

Registered: 2013-04-10

Posts: 1,638

Re: Ext4 or NTFS for Hard Drive dedicated to Downloading & Storage ?

Re-read https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Co … t#Legality, although I'd imagine this thread would be fine, if you remove some keywords.

If you're not dual-booting, and don't ever need to access the drive from Windows OS, definitely go with ext4 or any actual linux filesystem.

Disabling the 5% reserved blocks on ext4 should generally be safe, as long as you don't set it to 0% on your / partition.
See https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ex … ved_blocks

Last edited by ooo (2018-08-21 07:43:37)

mxfm

Member

Registered: 2015-10-23

Posts: 166

Re: Ext4 or NTFS for Hard Drive dedicated to Downloading & Storage ?

The question is void, because almost any filesystem can do this, and decision depends on OS usage, personal preferences, etc. What you heard about 5% in ext4 is true, as it is already explained. Ext4 also eats additional space for inodes, etc besides reserved 5%. On big drives this can consume significant amount of space. If you plan to access the storage from linux only and you have big storage (1TB>), you can focus on linux filesystems with low metadata overhead.

drcouzelis

Member

From: Connecticut, USA

Registered: 2009-11-09

Posts: 4,092

Website

Re: Ext4 or NTFS for Hard Drive dedicated to Downloading & Storage ?

I just installed a new 4 TB drive this month! I used Ext4. Here is my "/etc/fstab" file:

# /dev/sda1 LABEL=STORAGE
UUID=2e23fabe-4ed8-4acc-a3c8-e67f6f4bb38c	/storage	ext4		rw,relatime,data=ordered	0 2

I think you should stick with Ext4 (or any "Linux") filesystem for now, if Linux is all you use. It's nice to prepare for potential changes in the future, but you don't have any current plans to use Windows, and it is possible to prepare TOO much that you can't comfortably use what you have now.

ewaller

Administrator

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2009-07-13

Posts: 20,720

Re: Ext4 or NTFS for Hard Drive dedicated to Downloading & Storage ?

Consider that NTFS is a proprietary files system that *only* works on Linux because of a solid reverse engineering effort.  As such, even though it's implementation is pretty good, I always regard using it as being on thin ice.
OTOH, ext4 is rock solid and was designed with *nix in mind. It is a journaled file system, which has its advantages.  You can turn of that journal and gain some space back.  This is not a bad plan for data storage that does not change a lot.

Regardless of what you use -- back it up.

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