I have a 4TB NTFS external hard drive connected to a Raspberry Pi 4 with 2GB of RAM, running Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm. It currently uses NTFS-3G and has generally worked well, although simultaneous activity from Transmission, Plex, Audiobookshelf, and similar services can sometimes feel slow. I'm considering switching to the in-kernel NTFS3 driver for better transfer speeds, but I've heard it may be more vulnerable to filesystem corruption after an unexpected disconnect or power loss. These events are uncommon, but rebooting my router also temporarily powers down the Pi. I don't currently have a Windows machine available to run chkdsk, and I'd prefer not to deal with frequent filesystem repairs. How reliable is NTFS3 in practice compared with NTFS-3G for this kind of setup?
2 Answers
There isn’t a reliable percentage or benchmark for how much less reliable NTFS3 is. It has had bugs, including reports from people using it on internal NVMe drives, so faster performance does not necessarily make it the safer choice for an always-on external disk. If avoiding repair work is your priority, sticking with NTFS-3G is the more conservative option until you can verify the particular NTFS3 version in your kernel and test it with a backup.
Neither driver can make an NTFS volume immune to an unplugged USB cable or sudden power loss. Use a properly powered enclosure, shut the filesystem down cleanly when possible, and keep important data backed up. Since you don’t have an easy way to run Windows repair tools, the lower-performance NTFS-3G setup may be worthwhile for peace of mind. Also, switching to ext4 would generally be a better Linux-native solution, but only if you can arrange a safe migration and no longer need convenient Windows access.
The exact kernel version matters because NTFS3 behavior and bug fixes have changed over time. I’d check the version supplied by your Raspberry Pi OS installation before making the decision.