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

1st Official Post

    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

    • Official Post

    Using the words 'performance' and 'Pi3' in the same sentence is wrong to begin with. :) The RPi's are 35 dollar/euro kids toys, and should not be compared for performance to anything like an Intel PC.

    The Rpi has only a 100Mb/s network connection, which due to its design cannot even be used to its full potential. Also, any decent HDD will be faster than the (theoretical) 12.5MB/s network speed on a 100Mb/s connection. The slowest part in your whole network will always be the weakest link. In this case, the RPi's network. But I guess flac files are relatively small compared to video files, so it's all doable.

    If you are planning to use a RPi as a server with anything Linux, I would choose the Linux default EXT4 format. But I'm not totally objective, I've been using Linux for some 8 years now. If you need to attach the HDD to a PC, you can always run a Live Ubuntu Linux session from a bootable USB drive and have access to the EXT4 partition(s).