Linux data drive as NTFS, OK? Not OK?

Wouldn't use it as an actual system drive even as a /home part.

As storage ya it will work... just come with all the normal NTFS issues. It will still fragment and you will still probably want to defrag it with windows from time to time.. I think shake is still a thing as a command line defrag tool. If your using NTFS though so you can easily open your storage drive from windows just use windows to defrag.

If it is a windows system drive keep in mind all the issues there. In general you want to turn of hyberfile... if you are dual booting and sharing the drive you probably also want to change the way windows deals with time to keep your system clock set properly.

I have a few external drives that are NTFS... they work fine. I can open the data on windows PCs if needed. If I want performance though I reformat ext4.
 
As ChadD stated, never use NTFS as your /home partition. If you're just storing general data that should be fine assuming you're OK with all the performance issues.

I only ever use NTFS on external drives for cross platform compatibility, these drives aren't exactly performance oriented so NTFS is fine in this situation.
 
You should try ext4. The performance on it was one of the biggest reasons I moved to Linux. Just do a search for a specific file and see how fast it is, especially compared to NTFS on Windows.
 
Thanks all. The drive in question is a DATA drive. It is separate from the boot /home drive. Speed wise I haven't seen a difference. I just transferred 1.7TB of data to it and speed was as expected. Think I'll leave it as NTFS for now, I can always revert to ext4 if I run into issues. Sucks that Windows can't read ext4.
 
As ChadD stated, never use NTFS as your /home partition.

I recently tried this- I assume that you can do it, but the installers I used told me to eff off. Few distros have NTFS support enabled by default.

However, I have done it as a data drive in a dual-boot scenario and aside from the above-mentioned time issue, not problem.


Also, there is a non-free software suite that absolutely can enable read-write support for EXT4 in Windows, which has a trial period that you can test for yourself. That's the route that I might end up taking so that I can merge /home with user folders in Windows to some degree, stuff like media and downloads.
 
This is the solution. I can have my cake and eat it too. :)

I used it for the trial period, and it worked pretty well- I would recommend using EXT4 for everything at that point, which is not the default for many distributions (Red Hat family, looking at you).
 
Also, there is a non-free software suite that absolutely can enable read-write support for EXT4 in Windows, which has a trial period that you can test for yourself. That's the route that I might end up taking so that I can merge /home with user folders in Windows to some degree, stuff like media and downloads.

I've done this under Windows, but the software I used was totally free, no trial period. Search for Ext2Fsd.
 
I've done this under Windows, but the software I used was totally free, no trial period. Search for Ext2Fsd.

I tried it- claims support for EXT4, in practice I didn't have much luck. The paid stuff worked flawlessly for the trial period, and at US$20, well, that's not a hard sell if it's something you're going to use.
 
I tried it- claims support for EXT4, in practice I didn't have much luck. The paid stuff worked flawlessly for the trial period, and at US$20, well, that's not a hard sell if it's something you're going to use.


Really?

I admit, I haven't used in about 12 months, but the last time I used it, it worked brilliantly. That's a shame as it was really good software.
 
Really?

I admit, I haven't used in about 12 months, but the last time I used it, it worked brilliantly. That's a shame as it was really good software.

If that's the case then I should probably try it again- I can't say what the problem was, just that the paid stuff worked.
 
If that's the case then I should probably try it again- I can't say what the problem was, just that the paid stuff worked.

I might give it a shot as it was really easy to install and you didn't have to do anything, it just worked. I used it for years before switching to Linux full time.
 
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