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I tried googling this problem but I haven't received a definitive answer.

This is my situation, I have a 3TB external hard drive connected to my server via esata. I plan on sharing this drive over a network using samba. The hard drive is formatted in ext4 but I need a windows machine to be able to read and write to it over the network to access files, make backups and general storage.

I chose ext4 because I heard ntfs-3g has a ton of latency when accessing drives and I like how I can move files while I'm using them.

Is this possible or will I have to install some program to at least read the drive?

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It is certainly possible. To my knowledge, Samba doesn't care what file system you're using, just so long as you can read it and mount it. If you setup a Samba share that points to a directory on your esata drive, windows machines will be able to view it without ever having to know that it's formatted ext4.

edit: To provide more information, modifying your /etc/samba/smb.conf is how you would go about creating a share for your esata drive.

As an example, here is a relevant entry in my smb.conf:

[raid]
   comment = 4TB Raid5
   path = /mnt/raid
   public = yes
   writable = yes
   create mask = 0777
   directory mask = 0777
   force user = nobody
   force group = nogroup

That will create a share named raid that points to the directory /mnt/raid. It doesn't require a username/password, and it's writable.

After making those changes, use sudo service smbd restart to restart the samba server.

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    Thank you for answering! Will a windows machine be able to write to it over the network or can it only read the share?
    – brievolz84
    Nov 8, 2012 at 2:15
  • From what I can remember, on my server, I could read and write on the share from Windows 7 and Ubuntu. I think samba turns it into a "sambafs", so it's not seen as "ext4" anymore.
    – kroq-gar78
    Nov 8, 2012 at 2:22
  • If you set the share to allow writing, then it can write to it. I.E. if you have writable = yes in your share's entry inside of /etc/samba/smb.conf, then clients will be able to write to it. That's assuming permissions are set for the target directory of course.
    – smskelley
    Nov 8, 2012 at 2:22
  • OK thanks, consider this solved or answered (don't know how to do that to this thread)
    – brievolz84
    Nov 8, 2012 at 2:27
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    I included more information in my original answer to get you started. To mark this as solved, you would accept the answer (If I recall, there should be a button for that below the up vote/down vote options.)
    – smskelley
    Nov 8, 2012 at 2:31

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