Cross platform file systems (Mac, Linux, Windows)

[imrazor]

I've been trying for a while now to find a good file system to format external drives with. For a long time the best choice was plain old FAT32, but since it has a 4GB (or is it 2GB?) file size limit it's not good for transferring large video files, or holding games that use large archive files. I've played with ExFAT, but Linux apparently has some issues with it even after installing ExFAT fuse support. This has manifested as long shutdown times when an ExFAT drive is connected; I presume the computer is having trouble closing the drive.

HFS or one of its descendants may be the best choice, since I think Linux has native support and Windows support can be added easily with Paragon HFS. Am I on the right track, or is there a better choice?

 

[Erehy Dobon]

There's something wrong with your Linux system configuration or possibly a corrupted filesystem.

I have a 4 TB ExFAT external hard drive connected to my Raspberry Pi 4 which dual boots Raspbian and LibreELEC. There is no significant delay in system shutdown from either operating system and I haven't done any diddling with either OS.

Sometimes I also have a 64 GB SDHC card attached (also formatted as ExFAT).

The LibreELEC shutdown is particularly fast. It takes about five seconds. I do not manually unmount the partitions before shutdown.

The same ExFAT devices also behave quite normally on my Macs and Windows PCs.

For what it's worth, I ran Linux on Wintel hardware over twenty years ago and it didn't have any ExFAT partition unmounting problems back then either.

 

[kschendel]

The ExFAT linux driver was completely replaced in some recent version, 5.6 or 5.7 I think. I realize that doesn't help you if you're sticking to a distro kernel, but it does at least mean that you can expect non-stopper ExFAT issues to go away down the line.