I'm planning to replace Windows with Linux on my SSD while leaving my separate HDD dedicated to media storage. The HDD is formatted as NTFS. If I install Fedora on the SSD, will Linux still be able to access and play the files on the HDD, or will I need to reformat it? Does NTFS support work reliably across most popular Linux distributions?
3 Answers
Yes. Fedora and most other mainstream Linux distributions can read and write NTFS drives, so you should be able to keep your media on the HDD and use it normally without reformatting.
One important caveat is Windows Fast Startup or hibernation. If Windows was hibernated or left with Fast Startup enabled, Linux may mount the NTFS partition as read-only to prevent corruption. Fully shut Windows down before switching over, and disable hibernation or Fast Startup if you plan to share the drive between systems.
Popular filesystems such as NTFS, FAT32, exFAT, ext4, XFS, and Btrfs are generally supported either by the kernel or standard packages. Fedora should handle an NTFS storage drive without much trouble, though you may need to mount it manually the first time and configure it to mount automatically at startup if you want that behavior.
Good to know—thanks. I mainly wanted to confirm that NTFS support was common rather than Fedora-specific.