Formatting external USB drives

[Jay S]

Hello Everyone,
My start with Linux has begun to gather some steam! I've loaded LXLE on an older netbook and it seems to be fairly intuitive, though I'm just scratching the surface.

I've also loaded Raspbian on a PI 2 and have configured an older USB printer into a wireless networked device! That only took a decent part of two days... ;-} So far I've loaded and configured CUPS and SAMBA to manage the print server, configured the wireless to have a static IP address, loaded SSH and Putty for remote access and made so many mistakes along the way to confirm I'm a better nurse than system administrator!

My next goal is to add a pair of 2TB external USB drives to the network to eventually handle the duties of 1) a file server, 2) a DLNA server, and 3) an automated backup server (in this order).

Our household has (as many do) a combination of Linux, Windows and Apple devices, including laptops, tablets and phones. My question is this...which file system should I install on these drives to be able to support our home network? Through my reading, it seems that ExFAT is the best choice.

Thanks for the suggestions,
Jay

Enjoy the ride!

 

[Mitt Green]

Hello,

Let's see,

Ext2/3 both are available across all (almost all) operating systems as installable file systems. Both are reliable and support big drives and files. Not sure about smartphones and tablets though.

ZFS design is more suitable for flash memory (than ext), but operating system support is less impressive. There are problems to include support to the kernel, third-party module exists. It can be accessed using FUSE though.

Thus, ExFat will be probably the best variant so far because it is supported on almost everything you need and is designed to work on flash drives.

My 0.02

 

[ryanvade]

If you really need access from Windows then the options are limited. It is possible to access ext2/3/4 on Windows using tools such as ext2fsd. When I last tried it ext2fsd changed the file permissions incorrectly though. I did not try it over network however. If you use FTP or SFTP then the file system does not matter. For DLNA it depends on the client. Backup, however, is the tricky part. SAMBA may work in that case, so the file system does not matter. I usually recommend EXT4 for its simplicity and stability but ZFS is really good. BTRFS is stable enough to use as well but has a lot of features you may not need (As does ZFS)

 

[Darren Hale]

Fat 32 for me if using between windows and Linux 4 data.