I have a 1TB external hard drive currently formatted as NTFS, which holds about 600GB of downloaded games. Lately, I've been running into a ton of issues: Steam games keep updating non-stop, I've lost progress in a bunch of them, and many won't even launch no matter what I try. I'm thinking it's best to just format the drive and start fresh with re-downloading everything. I'm looking for advice on which file system will work best for me going forward and how to go about formatting it. Thanks for any help!
5 Answers
If you're not concerned about Windows compatibility, Btrfs could be a good choice; otherwise, ext4 is solid if you want to keep it usable on Windows too.
It's true that older Linux versions struggled with NTFS, but that's improved a lot over the last few years. The issues you're facing mostly come from Steam itself rather than the file system. If you do want to format, stick with NTFS for Windows access, or ext4 if you're only using Linux.
Don't forget that Steam has a backup and restore feature, which can save you loads of time on re-downloading games! As for Linux file systems, I'd recommend going with ext4 for sure.
You can definitely go for the ntfs3 kernel module, and that should work fine despite some negative comments you've been hearing. Don't let them scare you!
I agree, you shouldn't have any issues accessing your files with that setup.
Just to clarify, was this drive previously used exclusively for storing games and save data on Windows? I'm asking because game data from Windows isn’t always compatible with Linux, which might explain the problems you're encountering, rather than just the NTFS format.
Actually, Btrfs has become more stable for Windows support recently compared to ext4, so keep that in mind. Last time I tried ext4 on Windows, it was a mess. If you use WSL to access the drive, then the file system choice becomes less of an issue.