Not using EXT4 for external drive is a smart choice?

  • Hi there!


    I've buyed a Raspberry Pi4 to make a portable "mini" nas to download things, as a file storage and to enjoy films and music on the go.


    All is working good (more or less :)) but I'm severely undecided on what filesystem I should use on the related attached external hard disk (A simple 256GB mechanical hard drive. Is what I have now).


    The obvious choice should be EXT4, but I would love to occasionally use my hard drive on Windows (to rapidly copy big files through USB3, or to easily copy all files to another disk if I want use a bigger disk in the future), thus I'm not sure if another option would worth the hassle and the theorically loss in speed or features.


    Saying that, the obvious choice would be NTFS, but I've understood that this way I will lost ACL on folders but also no journaling is available, and I've read that is MUCH slower than Ext4.


    The next option is EXFAT, but is hasn't journaling of other cool things available on Ext4 and also I can't find no truly information on how much slower it is against the previously named options.


    Also, I don't know how hard and compatible are EXT4 alternative to set up on my Pi4 (NTFS and EXFAT are supported out of the box? They are an hassle to set up?)


    Ok, I could simply give up to put my HD on windows, but....


    Someone has some advice to tell regarding this topic? What should I do to have as little trouble as possible?

  • Hi,

    I am in the exact same position - only working on mac except for windows.

    Exfat is the only viable way for me to make data accessible on OMV and Mac directly. No idea what kind of speed reduction exfat has over ext4 but I guess Wifi speed will be the bottleneck anyways.

    I have followed this guide to set up exfat: [Guide]How to mount ExFat USB Drives Manually and use them on OpenMediaVaults WebUI

    With this I can read from exfat in the console but still I am not able to create a shared folder in ovm as the exfat drive is not in the list, although it is in the list off files system. No idea what the problem is...


    ..starting to wonder if OMV is really a good choice for me. I was hoping to setup a raid system in the end using exfat drives but that seems to be not possible at all. I might just create a samba server instead...

    • Official Post

    Exfat is the only viable way for me to make data accessible on OMV and Mac directly.

    Not sure what you mean by "viable" and "directly". I am having no problems accessing ext4 discs with my mac's and a Debian desktop. I do not currently have any OMV drives via usb, but I do not remember having any problems when I did.

    System Backup Typo alert: Under the Linux section the command should be sudo umount /dev/sda1 NOT sudo unmount /dev/sda1

    Backup Data Disk to Backup Disk on Same Machine: In a Scheduled Job:rsync -av --delete /srv/dev-disk-by-uuid-f8814ed9-9a5c-4e1c-8830-426968c20ea3/ /srv/dev-disk-by-uuid-e67439d5-00a3-4942-bd5f-b84ab86aa850/ Don't forget trailing slashes, and BE CAREFUL. (HT: Getting Started with OMV5)

    Equipment - Thinkserver TS140, NanoPi M4 (v.1), Odroid XU4 (Using DietPi): PiHole

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