File Format For External SSD [Solved]

[txm0523]

Greetings everyone,

Just have a quick question. What file format should I have on an external SSD ? From what I have read on the internet, you pretty much pick one. Huhhhh ?
Since it's a new external SSD, I want to reformat it to get rid of software previously installed on it and just use it to store my files.
Since it's a SSD, is there a specific file format I should use ? I run MX 23 Linux OS on my pC and laptop.

Thanks

[Charlie Brown]

You can create many partitions according to your liking, it doesn't have to be 1 partition.

Ext4 (as many as you like) and then 1 Ntfs partition would be good to make data accessible from both Linux and Windows.


P.S. Also (if you like) you can encrypt any of them before beginning storing your files, Veracrypt is easy to use and strong.

[txm0523]

Thanks for the info

[davidy]

I use exfat myself. Works in windows too so no need for partitioning. You will have to use the Format USB tool as gparted won't do it for whatever reason.

[DukeComposed]

Since it's a SSD, is there a specific file format I should use ?
[/quote]

The choice of file system shouldn't really matter if the drive is an SSD or conventional spinning rust. There are flash-friendly file systems like F2FS, but SSD drives don't usually have the same write-limit lifetime problems that flash cards do.

The real question of which file system to use is "What are you planning on doing with it?" If you only have one OS you're using, like Linux, pick a file system you like. If you plan on using this external drive to be able to transport files back and forth and share them between machines, you'll want a file system that is portable and runs on multiple OSes.

FAT32 is the traditional answer since it's supported by just about everything. FAT32 has limitations though, particularly around UNIX-like file permissions (it doesn't understand them) and around maximum file size (no file can be larger than 4 GB).

If you're going with FAT32, be sure to run something like mtree on your source directories so you can verify and correct file permissions later on with the spec file it creates after you've copied them off the external drive to a file system that understands UNIX-like file permissions.

If you want to get fancy, there's a third-party ext2 driver for Windows that avoids both of these problems.

If you want to think long-term, ZFS is an option. It runs on Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris-based systems, but there are outstanding projects that provide ZFS compatibility for macOS and Windows.

[fan_of_LTS]

I like the option to have two partitions with a filesystem such as ext4 for Linux (to make sure you preserve permissions and Linux things like symlinks) and exFAT for sharing files between Linux and Windows if necessary.

For me, an important benefit of ext4 is that I also use LUKS to make that encrypted. An external SSD is too portable to risk having unencrypted personal documents on it.