[Newbie question] Ext4 vs. NTFS - performance or compatibility regarding my use case? Music server (mini NAS) to stream flac files

Hi,

As a newbie I kindly ask for your support. I do have an external USB 2.0 hard drive with own power supply (2 TB, 3,5”, Western Digital). Currently I’m planning to purchase a Raspberry PI 3 B and combine it with this HDD as a DLNA (UPnP) music server, mainly for streaming flac files to a network AV-receiver and some other clients, most probably using LibreELEC.

With my HTPC (Intel NUC 5i5RYH, Windows 10 Pro 64) I converted many audio CDs to flac and stored them on the built-in HDD, which belongs to this Windows HTPC. In future, I’d like to move these flac files to the LibreELEC-based ‘music server’ (means storing them on the Western Digital HDD).

From time to time I am going to convert some more CDs to flac (using again the HTPC). The - future - PI 3, HTPC and AV-receiver will be all connected with each other in the same network via LAN. Thus, file transfer will happen via LAN.

In this use case, should I format the Western Digital USB 2.0 HDD with ext4 - for perfomance reasons? Is HDD performance relevant for running a music server, particularly for streaming flac files (via LAN)? Or for copying these files from the HTPC to the PI?

Or would it be better to format it with NTFS - for compatibility reasons (with the HTPC and two other Windows PCs that exist)?

Thanks in advance for your advise.

Regards,

Joe

Klojum Thanks for your hint. Instead of an RPi I ordered an Orange Pi Zero Plus yesterday. Thus, I will install the corresponding OpenMediaVault Image. As far as I found out, a LibreELEC image is not yet available for this SBC (Allwinner, H5 Quad-core 64-bit Cortex-A53).