I know there are loads of posts all over the internet about what filesystem people would recommend for their external harddrives, but since we're now a fair bit into 2013, i was wondering what the consensus is.
Ok, so i have my WD 1TB 'passport' and use it to back up everything.
It came as NTFS, but i never come into contact with windows pcs and don't much care for having to justify putting support for it into my custom kernels when there are likely better alternatives. I'd like to avoid it like the plague.
I've had it as FAT32 for a while (thanks to gparted), but i've seen some odd behaviour with the files on it probably fragmenting a bit (i do a lot of transfers now and then).
Tried ext2 briefly but had some problems getting access to it and it sectioned off ~16GB for itself (i do remember reading something about ext formats saving a small percentage of the disk for something, so FAT32 was certainly better in that respect in terms of maximising the disk capacity for my files.)
So the flash-friendly filesystem (F2FS) is now part of the stable kernels and i've used f2fs-tools to (scarily rapidly) format the drive to f2fs; included support for it in the kernel and made a slight tweak to /etc/fstab to mount it on /mnt/f2fs with a command, and i can access it and store things on it in spite of the obvious fact that it's a new filesystem so doesn't get the immediate recognition the average user is used to when using a usb device.
The key thought i have is: F2FS has some pretty impressive benchmarks and even gives ext4 a run for its money, but how stable is it really? I'd hate to lose what i'm about to put on my newly formatted drive?
Ext2 is good in that it doesn't journal, and i know you can get ext3/4 to not journal but is it ideal?
There are a multitude of formats of course, but it's 2013 now and so what i suppose i'm really asking is....What are you guys using?
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