I’m buying a Seagate external hard drive to solve my storage problems once and for all. I was wondering what format I should keep for the hard drive. I require the format to work with both Windows and EOS and not cause mounting errors on EOS (which seem common for external Hard disks pre-formatted in EXFAT). I also intend to keep my Steam library on the hard disk, and I want to be able to run games off the disk from EOS. This is not possible for EXFAT (learned through experience), as Proton gives me errors if I try launching games from an EXFAT partition.
No real reasoning behind it but I tend to use ext4, all my devoces and the others I connect to all have linux and it makes things easy.
Main things you want to consider it a) how stable is it
b) does it fit your requirements (some file systems can only support certain sized files (reallt not sure how to explain right now but sure someone has or can about this)
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exFAT is generally the “cross platform” choice for large drives, but if that’s giving you grief with Steam, you might see if you can bring ext4 drives into Windows.
See:
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Ext4 isn’t going to work with Windows without jumping through some hoops on the Windows side of things, and even then it’s not ideal.
ExFAT is the ‘best’ option for something you need to use across both OSes, but as OP has already noticed, will cause issues trying to do anything more involved than straightforward data access.
Unfortunately there isn’t really a suitable answer for an external drive with the use case described here - running games from external drives is already asking a little much of the bandwidth available even at USB 3.0 speeds for most modern games, and isn’t really something I’d suggest doing.
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Took me about 5 minutes to work out a year ago(hadn’t touched a windows system since 7), but yer I get if may be tricky for some but I would go with ext4, unless OP needs it another format for whatever reason it may be
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I considered Ext4, but as @z580c pointed out, it will be a bit irritating to access files from Windows.
Now, I’m leaning a bit towards NTFS, as I have noticed that proton seems to work fine with NTFS, Windows, and Linux. Both can read/write on NTFS (in my experience). Would there be any drawbacks for NTFS for a large hard drive (5 TB)?