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Finally ready to remove my Win7 partition on my Ubuntu Gnome system. I have 3 internal drives with music, movies, and pictures that I will be backing up and formatting. Should I format all my drives to ext4 from now on, instead of the good old fat or NTFS ?

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  • Are you going to have to use the drive on a different computer with a different OS?
    – Alex Lowe
    Feb 13, 2016 at 2:58
  • The only other things I would use would be my raspberry pi and htpc running openelec to stream movies from this PC.
    – aleitt
    Feb 13, 2016 at 3:06
  • Well then I would go ahead a reformat the drive to ext4
    – Alex Lowe
    Feb 13, 2016 at 3:08
  • It will give you more marginally better performance in Ubuntu and other Linux distros.
    – Alex Lowe
    Feb 13, 2016 at 3:09
  • If you do not reformat you at least need to keep a Windows repair disk, as you may need chkdsk periodically. Ubuntu auto runs fsck every 40 or 60 reboots, but cannot do the same on NTFS. Only from Windows can you repair NTFS.
    – oldfred
    Feb 13, 2016 at 4:56

1 Answer 1

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Ext4 is Ubuntu's default and supported filesystem. If you're going to use your drives only with Ubuntu or other Linux systems, the answer is yes: The best choice is formatting them as ext4.

But you need to have in mind that some systems (such as Windows) do not support ext4 natively and you may get into trouble if you need to install Windows some day.

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  • If I ever need to install Windows again, I can add another hard drive just for Win. The data would never have to be shared between them and if it ever did, I can use flash drive or cloud. I wonder if I would still have the same problems as before with sharing to my Kodi systems.
    – aleitt
    Feb 13, 2016 at 4:37
  • OK, then probably the best is to format all your drives as ext4. Just for sure, you could keep one as Fat32 or NTFS if you need to use it in another system. Feb 13, 2016 at 12:01

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