With SD cards, your choice should be entirely driven by which formats the devices you use support. However, that’s set to change in the future. Of course, if you’re also going to use your thumb drive on your current Linux machine, exFAT won’t work at the time of writing. Especially if you also want to use your thumb drive with iPads, iPhones and Macs.įAT32 is a fallback if you want to use your thumb drive with older devices that don’t support exFAT. Which means you may want to use large files, such as HD video files, on your thumb drive. With the fairly cheap yet large flash drives we have today, there’s some overlap in the use cases for thumb drives and external hard drives. SD cards and USB thumb drives are still an important part of our digital lives, so which formats should you pick? The choice for the best format for external hard drives involves different considerations compared to other forms of external storage. Unfortunately, Linux does not yet have support for exFAT, but that is reportedly set to change with the release of Kernel 5.4.
The most compatible option is FAT32, but as we mentioned above it has a hard 4GB limit on file sizes.
However, Linux supports NTFS, which makes for a decent go-between if you have both Windows and Linux machines.
Linux has its own proprietary EXT formats and if you are only going to use your external drive with a Linux machine, you can safely go ahead and pick that format. There is no filesystem that will be ideal for all operating systems, as they were all built differently.Linux distributions such as Ubuntu Linux are becoming more popular by the day, but are still relatively niche overall. You have to ask yourself, do I need to use those characters, or do I need individual file sizes to be higher than 4GB each. The following reserved characters are forbidden on NTFS files/names: (greater than) Only problem with NTFS is that it does not allow the following characters, which can be a problem on Linux and OSX, but obviously not on Windows: It also has very limited permission and ACL support for those who need to isolate different users from certain files. ExFAT has no file system-level encryption or compression support, and, like FAT32 before it, there is no journaling built into the exFAT file system. The problem with ExFat (even though others suggested it, is the 4GB file size limit.
NTFS is the most reliable of the three file systems because it is journaled. However, Mac OS has poor NTFS write support. You'd probably have to purchase the Paragon NTFS driver. See How-To Geek: How to Write to NTFS Drives on a Mac. If you add phones to the mix, you'll have to use FAT32 or exFAT. As long as you don't hit the file size limit of FAT32, they're pretty much the same. However, I would not use a drive formatted with FAT32 or exFAT for anything that isn't transient or unimportant. I recently had problems with both file systems on camera SD cards that required reformatting to fix. I don't even want to think about having the same issues with a 2TB hard drive. While you can fix minor problems on all three file systems with fsck, you will have to use MS Windows to fix anything major. Consider splitting the drive into two partitions. A large NTFS partition for data that is more stable, as well as read/write on Windows and Linux. A small exFAT partition to copy files from Mac OS.įAT32. Read/write on all three systems. Not journaled. File size < 4G.ĮxFAT. Read/write on all three systems. Not journaled.