I am currently running Ubuntu 10.04 and my hard disk's Partitioning is set to Master Boot Record with Filesystem type Ext4 (version 1.0).
I have purchased several new Western Digital portable external hard drives (500 GB). When I checked them, they were set to MBR and NTFS.
I have read that GUID is superior to MBR. Is that true? In any case, I have set these portable hard drives to that system instead of MBR. (I can, of course, change them back.) I see no difference in anything, operation-wise or performance-wise. What would be the pros and/or cons of this?
When I formatted these drives as Ext4, however, I see, with no data on the drives, that about 23 GB was being used (for something), reducing the amount of available space by that much.
When I reformatted them as NTFS, I see only 73.5 MB being used, a considerable difference.
Can anyone here comment on the pros and/or cons of these various file systems and how they will benefit (or detract) from my overall usage of these drives?
Or doesn't it make any difference at all? I'm using these drives strictly as storage media.
I thank you for your consideration.