I have a small external backup drive where I dump my phone camera captures and archive YouTube channels - nothing special; a few terabytes, mostly mp4s.
Is there anything I need to do before/after I swap?
If it matters, the drive is 9TB, formatted as NTFS, and connected via USB 3.0.
I also have 4 internal drives, but I’m not so much worried about them, as I plan on just formatting everything but the external.
small external drive
a few terabytes
I shudder to think what you consider big.
Anyway, you won’t have any issues with it, but if you’re going to use it for any length of time and not go back to Windows, I’d change it to something like xfs or btrfs. Hopefully it’s less than half full so that you can just shrink the partition, create a new one, move the data, delete the old, expand the new. If it’s more than half you might need to do it in steps. If it’s basically full, don’t bother because it’s more trouble than it’s worth.
I second btrfs. Even when I was sharing with Windows I used their btrfs driver and it worked fine there too, but I had to occasionally make my user the owner again booting back into cachy, so now I just dont share drives and relegated Windows to a small 120gb SSD for emergency use only.
NTFS reads/writes fine on Linux. But if anything goes wrong then you might need a utility to fix it (Mostly caused by sudden unplugging). If you have the option, I would suggest you format and the media drive in EXT4. Mind you, EXT4 can only be read by Linux systems.
You can also use exFAT if you want cross platform support. It’s had a Linux kernel driver for quite a while now.
This is likely not the case but I feel obligated to note that if you use Steam’s Proton and store games on an NTFS drive, its given me quirky problems in the past.
So it’s gonna be ntfs so it’s a matter of handling the permissions in fstab. Because it’s not gonna link your user ids from the NTFS files and map them automatically to your UNIX users. So there are options in fstab for that. Easy to look up. For instance maybe your user is ‘user’ so you’re gonna tell fstab to assign everything in a ntfs to partition to ‘user’. Except maybe you have media files served by plex media server running under user ‘plexmediaserver’. This kind of things.
There are no stupid questions.
Linux has been able to read any drive I have ever tried. NTFS is readable and writeable. I would bet almost all distros support ntfs. if they dont you can install ntfs-3g.
Edit: i dont usually use ntfs so I went and had a quick search, to make sure I wasnt wrong and remembering the right driver name. I also didnt think about drive health checks that they lightly cover in the link.
Aside from having it disconnected while you are formatting or installing to be safe, you should be able to use it just fine.
