Which Format for attached USB drive?

[Col8eral]

Which file system should be used for attaching a USB drive to my ASUS RT-AC88U router - FAT32 or NTFS.

Thank you

 

[thiggins]

NTFS will support larger volume size. There is no significant performance difference.

 

[ColinTaylor]

ext4

 

[Col8eral]

NTFS will support larger volume size. There is no significant performance difference.

Many thanks

 

[BubbleTrouble]

In my experience if the format of your USB drive is formatted to NTFS using a small block size you will get worse performance compared to FAT32.

 

[sfx2000]

NTFS will support larger volume size. There is no significant performance difference.

Given a choice...

• EXT3/4 - if the host supports is - challenge here is mounting the device on Windows/Mac - can be done, but some effort and SW downloads needed
• ExFAT - for USB devices, this might be a good choice if the host supports it - ExFAT is a MS licensed thing, so this depends on what the vendor does with MSFT - but this is a great format for USB/SD cards actually along with external USB HDD's
• NTFS - depends on the vendors - some use the FOSS driver, which works, and others use drivers from third parties that might have licenses or agreements from MSFT
• FAT/FAT32 - these days in the Linux community, these are reverse engineered drivers - good performance actually, but they're running into the same limitations as Windows is on large filesystems.