I bought an 2 TB external SSD drive that I want to use to back up photos, documents, etc.
I also want to be able to use the SSD on computers that run Windows.
My question is: how should I format the SSD drive? Which format should I choose? Ext4, Nfts or another format? The software, that I will use to format, is gparted.
Thanks in advance for your help!
By the way: I use Linux Manjaro Xfce with kernel 6.12.41-1 on my desktop PC and am very happy with it. I have got almost everything working, but I still have a lot to learn! I completely replaced my Windows 10 with Manjaro…
Then select NTFS.
File Systems – Manjaro
[HowTo] Mount NTFS correctly under Linux - Contributions / Tutorials - Manjaro Linux Forum
If you want to transfer files from other file systems to it make sure the NTFS naming convention is met, i.e. special characters like “:” etc. are not allowed on NTFS.
1 Like
I would suggest exFAT as a good choice for interoperability between Linux, Windows, macOS, etc.
Although both NTFS and exFAT started as proprietary to Microsoft, they released the spec for exFAT so it often has better cross-platform support, I believe.
3 Likes
NTFS has journaling which helps ensure the file system can recover from corruption, whereas exFAT does not. Journaling is a feature that allows the file system to keep records of changes made to files stored on it. That’s useful when data corruption occurs because journals can be used to recover broken data. exFAT doesn’t have this feature, and that means that data can be corrupted more easily when unexpected shutdowns occur.
3 Likes
Thank you very much for the clarification!
1 Like
Please also note,
that if you use NTFS (which is truly 20 years more technologically advanced than FAT), you’ll always need a Windows computer if something goes wrong with the file system.
- So please don’t unplug the SSD without unmounting it,
- and don’t turn off the PC with the power button.
2 Likes
exFAT and FAT are not the same thing. It is true exFAT is not a journaling system. but it was introduced around 2006.
2 Likes
From personal experiences, I can say that the point @andreas85 made is an important one.
I experienced it several times that for some reason the dirty bit gets set which requires intervention from a windows machine…
Apparently there is a way to mount an ext4 disk via WSL on Windows: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/wsl2-mount-disk
It might not work with the external drive though and I have not had time to try that myself yet
1 Like
This usually happens only if this partition has not been released properly after using from Windoze. So if you make sure to fully shutdown Win after usage, and not to use the treacherous Faststartup feature for example, you should be fine. Actually, I’m using NTFS partitions for years with exact zero problems, never needed Win OS to run chkdsk or other repair tools…
2 Likes
Just to be different…Windows does not natively support the ext4 file system used by Linux, but you can access ext4 partitions using tools like WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) or third-party drivers such as Ext2Fsd. These options allow you to read and write data on ext4 partitions from a Windows environment
3 Likes
I agree, generally it is safe to use ntfs.
It is good though to be aware that if something happens, Windows might be required to make the drive accessible again.
1 Like
Now is a good time to add a free windows live iso for checkdisk to your ventoy usb (on which you already have the manjaro iso)
https://www.hirensbootcd.org/download/
Just in case you do not have windows to dual boot. Is also useful for bios updates for aome OEMs.
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed 3 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.