Background
I have an NTFS formatted external drive attached to my Ubuntu 18.04LTS system that I use for temporary staging of files - some video files, some large archives receive from clients, lots of personal stuff.
None of it is critical in that I could always obtain another copy of anything on there, but there would be a serious hassle factor if it got corrupted.
The drive is formatted to NTFS, since it used to be attached to my Windows machine, but since I now use Ubuntu as my 'daily driver' I moved it over, and it works fine.
Last week, I was running a few things simultaneously that were disk intensive - I knew I was pushing the drive, and that having it do separate unrelated reads and writes all over the place would put it under pressure and slow down each process, but I was running them overnight, so I figured I didn't care if it took hours to complete everything.
The drive dropped out sometime overnight, and would not re-mount in the morning.
Ubuntu could not help, so I mounted the drive on Windows, and ran ChkDsk which fixed a load of issues, and on a second run, found no issues, after which it remounted on Ubuntu fine. I also ran a pass with SpinRite, and that reported no issues, so I am happy to continue with the drive given its current use scenario.
Question
Given that I have no intention of connecting the drive to Windows again (unless I needed to run ChkDsk!):
Would I gain (in terms of reliability) from moving the (single) partition over to EXT4? Would it be more 'resilient' than NTFS?
I have searched and found various discussions, but none seem to give practical answers to this question. This was close, but contributors seemed to veer away from the NTFS vs EXT4 reliability question:
There is free space, so I could easily shrink NTFS, create an EXT4 partition, move stuff over, then delete NTFS, and expand EXT4 to use the whole drive (might have to do it in parts as the drive is about 75% full) - the process would be a pain, and time consuming, but not difficult.
I'm just not sure if there would be much gain in doing it though.
Thanks in advance for your thoughts and advice,
Alan.
22 Answers
"Given that I have no intention of connecting the drive to Windows again (unless I needed to run ChkDsk!):" - is a key factor here. On a Linux system, ext4 is a much better solution to NTFS - it has "grown up" on Linux (as NTFS did on Windows). Similarly, it handles Unix file permissions better, and is understood natively - unlike NTFS which requires a plugin.
Regardless of your views on open source, NTFS isn't, while Ext4 is. This is important here as NTFS was reverse engineered, which can't be as good as a solution which is well documented and written for the task.
Both filesystem's are robust and scalable. Neither are remarkable or complex relative to newer ones (like zfs and btrfs). Ext4 is the correct choice for a Linux system where Windows is not an important consideration.
1The reliability problems which you experienced are almost certainly caused by the external disk's interface --- I'm assuming it's a USB-attached disk? Many USB/SATA interface chips are buggy, and/or not very standards conformat, and are only tested on Windows. As a result, you may experience problems no matter what file system you use.
Sometimes the problems are workload dependent, and depending on the kind of disk I/O requests sent from the OS to the drive, the drive's reliability in terms of randomly freezing up, causing a kernel crash, or failing to read or write data correctly --- may vary. So if the question is "will the drive randomly fail more or less often depending on whether I use ext4 or ntfs?", the answer is going to be unknown. You'll have to try and find out.
Ext4's file system consistency checker is almost certainly better than the ntfs's on Linux, because we've spent a lot of time trying on that. So if the question is "after my contents of my file system is scorched by buggy hardware, which file system has the better file system consisntency checker / repair tool", the answer is ext4.
Of course, you might want to consider whether the best choice is to replace your external disk. How much is a new external disk going to cost? How much is your time and the data stored on the disk worth?
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