What’s the Best File System for My External Hard Drive?

If this drive is solely for your Linux system, then go for btrfs. But if you're planning on using it with other operating systems, formatting it as FAT32 might be a better choice.

I have a 2TB external HDD formatted as NTFS and it works perfectly fine for me. You might also consider exFAT since it has good compatibility. If you want a robust Linux system format, ext4 or XFS would be great options. XFS is excellent for handling I/O and is efficient with large files.

Btrfs may not be the best for mechanical drives since it can fragment files, which could hurt performance. Ext4 is a solid choice, though. There aren't many special considerations for external drives. If you want better performance, consider disabling atime in your mount options. Using a single partition is fine, and while you can forgo a partition table, it might make the drive appear unformatted on non-Linux systems.

It really comes down to what you intend to use the drive for. I have an external HDD that deals with 100,000+ temporary files, so I chose XFS because it significantly outperforms others in speed for delete operations. I use NTFS when I need to share files with Windows users, but I wouldn’t rely on it for intensive Linux usage due to file permissions issues. Ext4 is fantastic if you want journaling for crash recovery.

I'd suggest going with whatever you’re comfortable using. I prefer ext4 for my main drives, so I format my external drives as ext4 too, just for simplicity and consistency. If you plan to use the drive across multiple systems, then you should pick a file system that works with all of them. I usually use my NAS for cross-system access, so I don’t worry about it too much.