Best file system for my shared external hard drive...

[bjdacre]

Gentlepeople,

I have been using an old wifi 5 TP-Link archer vr1600v for a few years now and sharing files via it's usb port from my ext2 formatted drive using cifs (v1.0). For a number of reasons, not the least of which are the acquisition of a few wifi 6 devices and possible performance issues with using such and old version of cifs, I decided to acquire a TP-Link AX20 (AX1800) to replace the old router. Unfortunately when reading reviews I was focused on the wifi performance and didn't read the fine print of the usb file system support... So no ext2.

If I decide to keep the router, my choices are fat32 (there is no circumstance under which I would use this file system), ex-fat, ntfs and hfs+. I chose ext2 because it is simple and reliable (and open source) and backups are way more important than meta-data journaling.

I have done some web searching but the comparisons are mostly useless telling me things I already know.

So I come to people with actual knowledge who have done more than read a spec sheet on their windows pc...

Thanks in advance.

Brendan

[szatox]

[Hu]

The question is, given a computing device that does not understand any decent filesystems, which of the bad filesystems on offer is the least bad? Very limited device support rules out all the traditional Linux filesystems. None of F2FS, XFS, ZFS, or ext4 are supported by this wireless router.

Ex-FAT is a close cousin of FAT32, which OP refuses to use. That eliminates 2 of the 4 choices. Historically, anything other than Windows does a poor job of using NTFS, so I would avoid that. I am not aware of any serious problems with HFS+, so I think that is picked by default as the only filesystem without anything seriously bad to say about it.

[bjdacre]

Thanks Hu, it's like you've read my mind...

I have never used hfs+ so have no practical experience of it. My reading suggests there may be some issues with it such as no concurrent file system access. I have tried to find out what that means because it seems incomprehensible that a "modern" file system doesn't support file level concurrent access control.

My experience of NTFS is reasonably extensive and while I think it way better than fat, I have experienced un-fixable mft corruption. It is proprietary so most non-windows drivers and tools will not be free in any sense to cover licensing. The free red/write linux driver while reliable was very slow. For these and other reasons I had decided not use NTFS some time ago.

I also have experience of ex-fat and still do as it is the file system on my micro sd card in my phone. The reason I ruled fat32 out was because if I was going to use a crap fat file system, it would be ex-fat since it at least supports files > 4GB. Anyway I still don't like it because I regularly have the the dirty bit set after I thought I had cleanly unmounted the drive so I now routinely fsck after I unmount the drive after copying music file to it. I have had other problems copying file from my music repository which happens to be my cifs connected ext2 drive such as a file copy not finishing at the end of a file but continuing copy to the one destination file. Most of the corruption I have been able to fix by deleting newly copied files, fsck and copying again. One corruption though I was unable fix with the linux fsck and had to boot to my last remaining copy of windows to fix. It is not clear to me though whether these problems are ex-fat's alone. I personally suspect that the crap cifs implementation on the vr100v may play a part and contributed to my decision to buy the ax20, not least because it implements cifs via samba.

Concurrent drive access would be a problem since I am sometimes editing tags on files I not copying and may be playing music from the drive as well.

Ah maybe I should just go back to DOS where you could only run one process at at time anyway...

Brendan

[petr2008]

The last time I used HFS+ it worked without errors. However linux driver did not support journal. When the disk was mounted to Mac it somehow added journal. So the next mount on linux was readonly. I may try to check how it works now.

[dmpogo]

What about NTFS dirver that is now in the kernel (as opposite to ntfs3g via fuse) ? I have not used it yet