Ok i have a 5TB usb hard drive that is mostly used for weekly backups of my system. It is hooked to a raspberry pi and has an exfat file system and used as a samba share.
But i need to occasionally unplug it and connect it directly to some other machines for 2 reasons.
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For use with steam on linux (i store my games on it)
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For use with obs on windows (i do some screen recording and need to be able to save the output to the drive)
Here's the dilemma. Games that require proton will not launch from an exfat drive (trust me i've tried all the "hacks" and cant make it happen). So i plan to reformat the drive as an ext4 file system.
However, windows does not support ext4 natively. I do have WSL and could probably mount it there but here are the issues.
Another user in my house will be primarily the one using obs and they are not technically inclined (or at least not linux inclined) i want them to be able to plug this device in and just press record and have it output to the drive, this was working fine with exfat but obviously once i reformat it could be an issue.
I have a few options and wanted to run it by here first before committing to the reformat.
Option 1) reformat drive to ext4. Keep it as a samba drive at all times, except when gaming, and have obs output the video to the drive over the network
-is obs capable of doing this reliably?
Option 2) reformat to ext4 and unplug drive when gaming or needing to use obs. Rig up a script to automount the drive with wsl when detected.
-will the mounted drive show up in the windows file explorer natively? Or could i at least pin its location to quick access?
-can i actually create some way for it to automount the drive with no user input required?
-ooh but the distro is on the drive to conserve the laptop's space, could present an issue
Option 3) reformat the drive as part ntfs part ext4 and then plug it in for gaming and obs?
-i believe in linux i could just add the part-uuid to fstab so it only mounts the ext4 portion or maybe i could mount both?
-would windows automatically just mount the ntfs portion?
Imo, option 1 is the best but i would like to have a fail safe in case i ever need to plug it directly to the windows machine. So realistically a hybrid of option 1 and 2 is best. Is there a better way to do this? Will any of these methods work?
Just use NTFS for the whole drive. The new
NTFS3kernel driver in Linux has fairly decent performance (waay better than the oldntfs-3gdriver), and has been pretty stable since kernel 6.2.The key thing you'd want to do though is to use the mount options
nocaseandwindows_namesin your fstab.nocaseenables case-insensitive file/folder support similar to the default behavior under Windows with NTFS volumes.windows_namesprevents the creation of files or directories with names not allowed under Windows. This checks for forbidden characters in the name like /, , :, *, ?, <, >, |, " or ending with a space or a period. There are also other checks for matching the behavior of Windows with this mount option for rejecting file/folder names that may be valid on Linux systems but not under Windows.These two mount options should solve most of the issues Linux NTFS users may face. Do note that to use the above mount options, you'll need to be on at least kernel 6.2.
I second the recommendation to use NTFS. I don't have the same use cases as OP, but in my experience it works really well. Back in the days when I was using Windows, I had a system and a data partition (i.e. personal files, pictures, videos... you get it). When I switched to Linux, I kept my data partition and just mounted it on my Linux system. I started with dual boot and didn't have any issues. No need to manually install a NTFS driver these days.
That's a couple of years ago and my secondary SSD's still that same old NTFS partition. Thought about moving to a Linux native filesystem, since I don't use Windows anymore, but never had an actual reason to do it.