I have a 1TB external hard drive that's currently formatted as NTFS and it's got about 600GB of downloaded games on it. Lately, I've been running into a ton of issues like constant updates on Steam, losing my game progress, and many games not launching at all. Because of this, I'm thinking about formatting the drive and starting fresh with everything downloaded again. Can anyone suggest the best file system to format it to, and explain how to do that? Thanks!
5 Answers
Don’t forget about Steam’s backup/restore feature! It can help you save time on redownloading everything. But if you’re asking about Linux file systems, I’d definitely go with ext4.
Just a thought — did you originally use this drive for games and save data on Windows? Windows game data might not be fully compatible with Linux for every Steam title, which could explain some of the issues you're having, not just the NTFS format.
Usually, Linux has improved its handling of NTFS over the last few years, so you should be fine using it. But if you decide to wipe the drive, just remember that if you want Windows compatibility, go with NTFS again. Otherwise, ext4 should be your go-to for Linux.
If you don’t need the drive to be readable on Windows, I’d recommend using Btrfs. However, if you want to keep it accessible for Windows, stick with ext4 instead. Just keep in mind that Btrfs has improved compatibility on Windows compared to ext4 lately!
You can simply mount your drive using the ntfs3 kernel module, and it should work fine despite what some naysayers might suggest. Don’t stress too much about those warnings, they're mostly overblown.
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