Hi Everyone,

I would like seek your advice and guidance with regards to the file system to use on my external HDD.

I have a WD My Passport 2TB HDD that I would like to use with my Work Computer (Windows 10/11), Personal Laptop (Linux Mint) and my iPad Pro 11" (APFS). I will be using it to store both my work files (various references, bash script repository, documents) and personal files (mostly media content either downloaded or from my phone / iPad).

My initial thought was to exFAT the whole drive as it's supposed to be the most compatible file systems. However, upon reading this article, not to mention going through some of the forum posts, i'm not so sure now.

Then I thought perhapds I can go for NTFS instead. I understood that the Linux kernel now has native read & write capability to an NTFS partition. On the iPad Pro, at least I have read only access, which is majority of my use case. then recently I came across this article which talk about issues with NTFS support on Linux.

So now I'm kind lost as to what is the best solution ? I'm thinking maybe I'd need to use multiple partitions ? Any ideas ?

I have had no issues with NTFS on external drives with any Linux distro that I've used.

You do need to make sure nfts-3g is installed; I think many distros include it by default these days.

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Data are just data - there is no intrinsic requirement to use a particular filesystem.
A corollary might be that a single copy of that data is never safe. I keep my data on linux filesystems, and copy it to an external as necessary for interchange. Doesn't matter if the intermediary is flaky or not, it can always be repeated.

NTFS has some ability to journal where the exfat (fat) doesn't have.

NTFS works fine with Linux, however there is a significant performance hit when using NTFS partitions from Linux. In a test I ran a while (in 2021_ ago I found the same command run on ext4 took less than 1 second (0.107s) whereas it took almost 34 seconds (33.997s) on NTFS parition. [https://www.suramya.com/blog/2021/05...ared-to-ext4/]

Windows 10 now lets you mount Linux ext4 filesystems in WSL 2, so that is an option as well (But I have never tried it)

- Suramya

I also used the NTFS file system with the ntfs-3g package without any problems. I do not know anything about your iPad as I have never used any apple products.

The link below has some information for anyone who would like to read, but basically what you need to know is that the NTFS driver is included with kernel 5.15

https://www.techrepublic.com/article...x-kernel-5-15/

I recommend that you create multiple partitions and format a partition in each of the native formats used by your devices. That should minimize the problems caused by an operating system not handling a foreign file system very well.

When you need to convert a file from one file system to another you should copy it into the partition which is the native file system for the device that you are going to manipulate the file on.

As a general rule an operating system does a better job of reading an alien file system than it does writing an alien file system. So you should to set up a table of what file systems each of your operating systems will handle so you will know which operating systems can do which cross platform copy. As a general rule you should set the copies up so that the operating system is copying from an alien file system into a native file system.

Hi chrisqck,

My 2 cents ...

I use exfat on USB drives, SD Cards and such - however, I have never formatted en entire hard drive or SSD with it. It is compatible with all 3 of your operating systems, though, so that is an advantage. Its lack of journaling capability will be more of an issue if your data is of critical importance, but, as mentioned by syg00 above, in such a case you would want to have robust backups.

As with all others here, I have been using NTFS with linux for years, on both internal and external drives, up to 6 TB in size, with no issues whatsoever (reliability, performance ...). So if you don't need to write from the system that only has read ability on NTFS, this is perhaps a more time-tested choice.

I would probably go with NTFS.

Cheers - hope this helps.

Rick