Are Western Digital drives trustworthy these days.

[ipd@universeodon.com]

@mcc

I'm not keen on TB, Makes it hard to breathe, fortunately there is medicine for that these days, so far.

[mcc@mastodon.social]

Hey if I want to format an HD for archival purposes, and I want it to be accessible from both Windows* and Linux** without problems, do I use… exfat? Will exfat freak out if I format it at absurdly high sizes like 12 TB, or give me an annoyingly high "minimum file size" or something? Are there any more-reliable/journaled FSes that both these OSes are happy with?

* 10
** Let's say Debian Trixie

[blair@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@mcc My mind immediately went to this scene from Contact (spoilers!) https://youtu.be/Et4sMJP9FmM?t=127&si=Ruwy77OYl3usRac5

[foritus@toot.dusepo.co.uk]

@mcc chaos option: ntfs as the Linux ntfs driver is pretty good these days.

[jernej__s@infosec.exchange]

@mcc I've had some weird corruption on exFAT on Windows, so I'm not really sure what to suggest here.

I played with UDF in the past, but had some corruption as well. IMHO you'd best use separate partitions for Windows and Linux.

[demize@unstable.systems]

@mcc exfat is broadly fine for this, but comes with the usual restrictions on filenames/etc

NTFS is arguably also fine for this depending on how much you actually want to write to it from linux but exfat is better (though I think the ntfs driver on linux has gotten decent enough? idk)

unfortunately as far as I’m aware there is no stable driver for windows for any modern linux filesystem so while technically you could btrfs or maybe xfs or zfs you really should not

[jmhill@infosec.exchange]

@Foritus @mcc was gonna suggest this myself. NTFS is perfectly adequate on Linux nowadays and I imagine it will still improve with time.

Now, assuming we're talking about an actual HDD, data longevity on magnetic media is more likely to present an issue in the long term.

[porglezomp@mastodon.social]

@mcc I used exfat for this, it was fine for a 7TB hard drive. After doing this for a while and being rude to the drive, I ended up damaging the drive or filesystem and Linux just completely failed handling that, instead of giving useful errors the driver would lock up and make filesystem syscalls block forever.

[blair@mastodon.gamedev.place]

Now in meme format!

[elladan@kind.social]

@mcc my understanding is exfat supports large disks / files and has mature drivers, and I expect is much more reliable than NTFS on Linux. So hypothetically it's an appropriate choice.

But personally I wouldn't trust either and would just use ext4 or something -- windows should be able to use Linux filesystems reliably with a VM after all.

[rotopenguin@mastodon.social]

@Foritus @mcc put one giant bcachefs file on ntfs, and mount into that.

[mcc@mastodon.social]

@jmhill @Foritus What other options are there? I was told that flashdrives can lose data if they are unpowered for more than a year and this claim is repeated often on the internet

[mcc@mastodon.social]

@demize This look stable? https://openzfsonwindows.org/

[rotopenguin@mastodon.social]

@porglezomp smartctl would probably tell you that the drive has a bunch of bad blocks, which would result in the drive essentially locking up doing retries on access.

[mcc@mastodon.social]

Okay but seriously: Should I NTFS? People are saying the Linux NTFS driver is "pretty good" "perfectly adequate" is "adequate" what I'm looking for with my backup HD

https://toot.dusepo.co.uk/@Foritus/116155362354958361

[mcc@mastodon.social]

@rotopenguin @Foritus is this a serious suggestion?

In what way would it be better than NTFS straight?

Why not bcachefs on exfat?

[lambdageek@mastodon.social]

@elladan @mcc Seems like this should work if you have a version of windows that supports WSL2 https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/wsl2-mount-disk

the instructions are kind of convoluted bu t toward the end they mention that once it's mounted in a WSL Linux distro, you can then also attach it to windows explorer.

[finagle@hachyderm.io]

@mcc Install a Linux file server on the disk serving itself

[lambdageek@mastodon.social]

@elladan @mcc I'm amused that to find the disk id, you apparently have to issue a SQL statement to some obscure subsystem of windows. typical

[rotopenguin@mastodon.social]

@mcc @Foritus nah I'm just joshing about a much-worse-case setup. Especially considering that Mr. Bcachefs is a vibe coder.