[CONFIGURATION] A two terrabyte HD formatting question for storage

[woodsmoke]

Hi all,
I lucked into purchasing a Lenovo desktop that has a mobo with 6 usb ports, HDMI and a 2 terrabyte hard drive.

I did this because, the Blue on Blue mobo on a mirror hanging on a wall computer will eventually go to the great mobo pastureland in the sky so this is a replacement for the mobo.

But, also it has a 2 terrabyte SATA hard drive, with Windblows on it and I want to use that for a storage drive and I got it for less than the price of a similar drive alone.

I have NEVER had a drive this huge.

So, I have a simple but, also kinda complicated, question about just ...

PARTICULARLY to what extension should I format the drive to be "seeable" by both my older installs, going back several years, and also a new install which i downloaded a few days ago..

Since it is SATA I can plug and unplug as I wish.

I have always just gone with Ext4 but I MAY have read that Ext4 may not be the best for this large a drive, dunno, it may be ideal.

So, I would greatly appreciate if some kind folks would recommend an extension for formatting it for a storage drive.

Thanks in advance!

woodsmoke

[Snowhog]

ext4 can more than handle your 2 terrabyte drive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext4

[oshunluvr]

EXT4 will work just fine. From wiki:

The ext4filesystem can support volumes with sizes up to 1 exbibyte (EiB) and single files with sizes up to 16 tebibytes (TiB) with the standard 4 KiB block size.

WHAT you're going to store on it may be more important - some file systems do better on large files, some on small.

[woodsmoke]

Hi GUYS!!!
and THANK YOU!

ALL of my stuff is very small, documents, you name it, but also downloaded music and sometimes videos which can be largish. Also because of the whole pandemic thing I am converting my presentations for the college to .pdf and including an audio commentary.

These are for the quarantined students.

The provided software by the college that allows teachers to "move their mouse around on the desktop or in a video etc. and record that for the students is all well and good but it produces HUGE files.

I literally have students who are on a dial-up, as do the other instructors, and the files just strangle their connections and cost money if they have overages. So, I do the two files and the student can just read the .pdf or do both. But, the files are discrete and not that large by our standards.

So...okay!!!!

thanks again!

woody

[jglen490]

As oshunluvr indicated it's conditional. At home, I use ext4 and have almost exclusively used it since my first Linux. For the non-profit I support, the NAS runs BTRFS in a network with mostly Windows PCs. BTRFS and ext4 both do what they do magnificently, don't be concerned about either one for your situation.