What's the best format for an external drive for me?

1st Official Post

    Hi. Advice welcomed on the right format (NTFS, exFAT, ext4, etc.) for my circumstances, which are that I have an 8TB archive external drive I want to fill up with movies/TV.

    These files are currently sitting on my windows PC and I'll want to access them from the PC in the future, but the primary use will be LibreElec on a RPi4. I intend to download to the RPi SD card, then move the completed download to the external disk.

    (I hope there will also be music files which I'd like to access via BubbleUPnP, but that should be straightforward and could be ignored if not possible.)

    What's best, please? /shrug

    Edited once, last by UberAllex (January 26, 2020 at 12:36 AM).

    Thanks for the input.

    So, after poking around I came across this description of how to create a new partition, but it's from 2017. Are the instructions still valid in 2020?

    Formatting and mounting 2. hard drive

    Code
    parted -s /dev/sdb mklabel gpt
parted -s /dev/sdb mkpart primary ext4 40s 100%
parted -s /dev/sdb name 1 'MEDIA'
mkfs.ext4 -L "MEDIA" /dev/sdb1
fsck.ext4 -y /dev/sdb1

    And would it be so easy as to substitute ext4 for EXFAT if I wanted to use that file system format?

    • Official Post
    Quote from UberAllex

    And would it be so easy as to substitute ext4 for EXFAT if I wanted to use that file system format?

    I'm sure there is a Linux command for formatting to EXFAT. I've never used EXFAT.

    I'm not sure if there will be some type of performance loss in EXT4 vs EXFAT.

    The only other drawback of formatting to a different format is of course the loss of all data on that disk.