USB drive partition

[Tucher]

Does it make much difference if a USB drive is formatted in FAT32, exFAT or NTFS? I would assume exFAT or NTFS would be best.

[the_bertrum]

NTFS won't work, this is linux

[DRONE7]

Fat32 is universally accessible and as your tracks won't be greater than 4GB then this should be fine.

[Tucher]

NTFS won't work, this is linux

Linux can mount and read NTFS. I know it is not the best choice for linux, but it is efficient and has a low power requirement. Same goes for exFAT. That is why I asked.

[Tim Curtis]

NTFS won't work, this is linux

Linux can mount and read NTFS. I know it is not the best choice for linux, but it is efficient and has a low power requirement. Same goes for exFAT. That is why I asked.

If you need a storage format thats fast, reliable and portable between Linux, Windows, Mac or just about any other OS then use Fat32. If its an all Linux environment then use the native Linux EXT4 format.

My experience with NTFS some years back was that it was slow compared to Fat32 on Linux prolly because NTFS has to go through a kernel/userspace bridging layer called FUSE while Fat32 has a native kernel driver. I also recall having permission compatibility issues with NTFS and there is some question over the quality and support of the FUSE-3D bridge driver. ExFat makes no sense to me unless you are all Windows or there are individual files  > 4GB file size.

[Nutul]

NTFS won't work, this is linux

Linux can mount and read NTFS. I know it is not the best choice for linux, but it is efficient and has a low power requirement. Same goes for exFAT. That is why I asked.

I'd use exFat, BUT the fact is that I really use EXT4.
Now, I have only Linux machines at home, and this helps me copy things over just swapping the USB disks from one machine to another... but if you copy your music via SMB connection, then you should have no trouble using EXT4 as well. EXT4 is Linux native, and I believe moOde (well, the underlying OS...) would be happier with such FS.

[Tucher]

Thanks for all the replies. I am using a 512GB thumb drive, formatted to exFAT, to hold my audio. Plugged into a USB 3 port on a Pi 4 there are no issues. I can stick it in a windows machine to add or remove files which is nice. I just wanted to get the advice of a group of people smarter than me about the format.

Thanks

[the_bertrum]

NTFS won't work, this is linux

Linux can mount and read NTFS. I know it is not the best choice for linux, but it is efficient and has a low power requirement. Same goes for exFAT. That is why I asked.

I was I confess being a little loose with the definition of "work".  As Tim pointed out, there are often issues so I mark is as "doesn't work" in my mind.