Hardware Best file system for external HDD?

[SomeGamer]

I got a 2TB external HDD and was wondering which file system and cluster size would be the best for it as I have no plans of reformatting ever. (All the info I found on Google was old and/or conflicting.) Also, would the recommendation change if I threw encryption into the mix? Thanks in advance!

 

[Ryccardo]

Also, would the recommendation change if I threw encryption into the mix?

No, full-drive (actually full-partition) encryption is something that's typically handled at a layer between block device (whole disk, sectors, etc) and file system

I got a 2TB external HDD and was wondering which file system and cluster size would be the best for it as I have no plans of reformatting ever.

My opinion is that best should mean easiest to use on a different system.

FAT32 is king by a long way, but file size limitations (and huge block sizes for that partition size) may be objectionable
NTFS is therefore my recommendation: full support on Windows, near-full support on most other major OSes (preinstalled in most consumer Linuxes, an optional install for read/write support on most others and Mac OS)
FAT64/exFAT effectively combines the advantages of the above (after a very rough start), but it's still less popular, and the non-journaled, single-allocation-table-by-default is something I would be wary of (especially if you use write caching to improve performance)
If you are really committed to Mac OS, Linux, BDSs, etc you may choose their native file systems - but cross platform support is considerably worse

 

[SomeGamer]

No, full-drive (actually full-partition) encryption is something that's typically handled at a layer between block device (whole disk, sectors, etc) and file system


My opinion is that best should mean easiest to use on a different system.

FAT32 is king by a long way, but file size limitations (and huge block sizes for that partition size) may be objectionable
NTFS is therefore my recommendation: full support on Windows, near-full support on most other major OSes (preinstalled in most consumer Linuxes, an optional install for read/write support on most others and Mac OS)
FAT64/exFAT effectively combines the advantages of the above (after a very rough start), but it's still less popular, and the non-journaled, single-allocation-table-by-default is something I would be wary of (especially if you use write caching to improve performance)
If you are really committed to Mac OS, Linux, BDSs, etc you may choose their native file systems - but cross platform support is considerably worse

Thanks very much! I'm actually going for full-drive encryption because despite what I've seen that OSes corrupt the drive by initializing unallocated space, Windows was more than happy to format a RAW partition while it didn't even show the drive with (seemingly) unallocated space (only in System Management).

A bit unrelated question, turning on NTFS compression on the drive I get after mounting the partition with VeraCrypt should be safe, right? (AFAIK files get compressed, then that data gets passed to VeraCrypt meaning it doesn't mess with VeraCrypt headers or anything which would make the data unreadable.) Or is it a bad idea entirely because it'd slow to a crawl?

 

[migles]

what do you use the external drive for?
PC? NTFS default allocation size, cluster doesn't matter in the end...
if you use it with consoles that might not suppot NTFS like wii, ps3, fat32 32k cluster
(most of stuff for the wii is compatible with NTFS, but not all)

 

[SomeGamer]

what do you use the external drive for?
PC? NTFS default allocation size, cluster doesn't matter in the end...
if you use it with consoles that might not suppot NTFS like wii, ps3, fat32 32k cluster
(most of stuff for the wii is compatible with NTFS, but not all)

Already formatted as you said, but thanks for your answer! Now deciding on whether to enable NTFS compression.

 

[migles]

Already formatted as you said, but thanks for your answer! Now deciding on whether to enable NTFS compression.

don't enable it, very likely the gain is very minimum...
if you want to achieve stuff, you better with 7zip

 

[SomeGamer]

don't enable it, very likely the gain is very minimum...
if you want to achieve stuff, you better with 7zip

It's a mess with all kinds of files, not sure how much time they'd take to 7zip.

 

[Seriel]

Already formatted as you said, but thanks for your answer! Now deciding on whether to enable NTFS compression.

If the goal is to decrease storage space then this will work at the cost of performance, even more so if the files are the type that have lots of repeated bytes.
However I don't recommend turning it on for the whole drive, if you need it for some folders or files you can just enable it in Properties.

Spoiler

 

[SomeGamer]

If the goal is to decrease storage space then this will work at the cost of performance, even more so if the files are the type that have lots of repeated bytes.
However I don't recommend turning it on for the whole drive, if you need it for some folders or files you can just enable it in Properties.

Spoiler

Thanks! So even by today's standards, NTFS compression still comes with a noticeable speed decrease?

 

[Ryccardo]

Thanks! So even by today's standards, NTFS compression still comes with a noticeable speed decrease?

NTFS compression is actually very lightweight (remember, it has to be backwards compatible with all Microsoft OSes supporting NTFS)
It's probably not that significant in real world use (especially on a mechanical drive), but it's still useless or counterproductive on already compressed files

 

[SomeGamer]

NTFS compression is actually very lightweight (remember, it has to be backwards compatible with all Microsoft OSes supporting NTFS)
It's probably not that significant in real world use (especially on a mechanical drive), but it's still useless or counterproductive on already compressed files

Most of them aren't compressed, I try to compress the bigger ones now though.