Wednesday, September 3, 2014

filesystems - What is a good file system for removable storage on Linux?


I have a 500GB external drive I want to use on a couple of Linux systems, and looking for a filesystem for it. External drives are frequently formatted in FAT32, but I don't need to interoperate with Windows and would rather avoid the ugly limited kludge that is FAT.


Since I only need to use it on Linux, I would use ext4 or XFS, but they store ownership information. Ideally, I'd use a proper Unix file system that doesn't track ownership (files are owned by whoever mounts the device, like they are when mounting a FAT32 partition), but I do not know of any file system that does that.


What would be a good file system for this disk?


Answer



You didn't mention anything about speed, but if you are concerned about it, then I recommend ext4. It is starting to mature nowadays.


I would only use XFS on a large drive with large files.


If you want stability and compatibility, then ext3 is the way to go.


These articles and their comments may be of some use:


http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux_2632_fs&num=1


http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/388


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