Need for an NTFS Parition

**Hawkway** · January 6th, 2013

I'm setting up a home server for the first time and thought I would make one of my HDD an NTFS drive because it seemed that it would be easier to share files with my Windows PCs on the network. However, when I noticed the slower transfer speed, and that Samba allowed me to access the ext4 partitions with no problem (and faster) I started to wonder.

Is there any real benefit to having an NTFS partition on a home server that will only be running Ubuntu Server (no dual boot)? Before I reformatted and had all ext4 partitions, I wanted to be sure I wouldn't regret it. Thanks.

**darkod** · January 6th, 2013

No, there is no need for ntfs at all. The Samba shares do all the work to present the network shares to windows machines. The windows client doesn't care about the filesystem on the server.

**coffeecat** · January 6th, 2013

Originally Posted by Hawkway

Is there any real benefit to having an NTFS partition on a home server that will only be running Ubuntu Server (no dual boot)?

There is one very good reason not to use NTFS in this circumstance. If the partition were to suffer filesystem corruption, you do not have access to the chkdsk utility in Windows to fix it. There is no Linux utility that can completely replace chkdsk.