NTFS HDD to EXT for FTP/MiniDLNA Server

Good Morning,

I have two identical 4TB external HDDs. One is formatted currently NTFS and has about 1.8TB of movies (all in folders, organized, named, etc) and about 200GB of music. Prepping to download and install OpenWrt on a Linksys EA6350v3, I was told NTFS is not the fastest/best filing system to use and was open to recommendations on what was better and transferring it. I have a Cinnamon virtualbox machine running (learning Linux) that might help. Thanks!

no problem with ntfs-3g ( write & read )

If you want as good cross platform support as possible exFAT is probably your best best even though it might not be ideal. There's also work ongoing to add it as a driver for mainline Linux kernel. (lib)fuse in the repo is quite old (roughly 3 years) so you might encouter bugs that has been resolved in newer versions.

If you plan to dedicate those drivers to this task, and will always be plugged to the router exclusively, I would go for a native filesystem, preferably EXT4. But this is a hard-to-swallow pill, as you will have to move all the contents somewhere else and format the drivers.

3 Likes

And with product similar to this ?

https://www.amazon.fr/ACEPC-Ventilateur-Préinstallé-x5-Z8350-Quad-Core/dp/B07HC7M87W

https://fr.gearbest.com/mini-pc/pp_009989099374.html?wid=1349303&currency=EUR&vip=4386417&gclid=EAIaIQobChMImMyV4_St5QIVUqqaCh1EfAecEAkYBiABEgJXYvD_BwE

hmmmm....So would ext4 be any faster or comparable to exFAT? Just something else to put out there, assuming both options are better than NTFS? I can't remember if exFAT had trouble with a 4tb drive though

If you are going to connect a couple of drives holding movies and music by USB, I think speed should not be on your list of concerns, at least when choosing a filesystem. In Linux, NTFS support was developed using reverse engineering, extFAT support is controversial; but EXT4 was developed in house, and beats both NTFS and extFAT in stability.

1 Like

Just connecting one drive, but as I said, it's a big drive. Speed is only a concern because I have two televisions that may try to stream continuously from it but mostly expect a whole bunch of laptops and phones (like up to 15) trying to pull from it, either via FTP download or Kodi

I have a 3tb ntfs drive on my OpenWrt device (wrt1200) with about 1tb of movies and 200gb of music and it works fine for dlna streaming, but usually tops out at just around 15mbps for actual file transfers. Its been a while since ive used my ext4 drive, but i do remember that it was faster (file transfer) and easier to configure in OpenWrt than ntfs.

well if the streaming is plenty fast, I guess I don't really have to worry about file transfers so much.

In stability? Can you elaborate? You have millions of phones using exFAT just fine... It's more than fine for the said usage, it's not perhaps the best if you want to run a database server etc however. Also, since he has the cpu power btrfs would at least tell him about silent corruption (in theory at least) but it's not very portable.

1 Like

Sorry for not knowing, but what do you mean by the repo? I'm guessing by that sentence that you're referring to the ntfs addition which, to me, translates to an OLD driver and therefore the bugs/possible instability. I presume exFAT is faster, as well??

I did not say it was unstable, I said it was controversial: https://lwn.net/Articles/797963/