NTFS on Linux - safe? stable? or reformat to ext4?

[giantbucket]

i have 4 hard drives (3TB each) from my Win8.1 machine that hold a ton of movies, shows, photos, music, etc. they're all obviously NTFS-based.

i want to use LinuxMint for my NEWLY BUILT media machine instead of buying yet another Win license, so should use ext4 for the media filesystem, or is NTFS safe and stable under Linux? obviously i'd have to move contents to another drive, reformat the original, and copy back. and do this 4 times over. there goes a week!

i have the drives, but not the patience. NTFS is good? or ext4? the "old" machine is being converted to a workstation for CAD and photo/video editing, so i can't just move my license over.

 

[SchizTech]

The NTFS driver seems fairly stable in my experience. As long as they're kept separate drives and not linked to any system directories it should work (I only say that because linux permissions don't work on NTFS. I once tried to use a shared NTFS partition as /home on a dual boot, which didn't really work well). You'll probably have to manually mount them at bootup or edit config files (i.e., /etc/fstab) to automatically mount them at startup. Otherwise the kernel won't auto-mount the non-linux filesystem.

 

[martinch]

Never had a problem connecting an NTFS-formatted external drive to a Linux box (I use Linux Mint, and it auto-mounts them and reads/writes without a problem).

 

[kanewolf]

What is the probability of moving them back to Windows? If you believe those disks will stay in a Linux system, then I would use a Linux native file system. Hopefully, those aren't the only copies of irreplaceable files.

What about this -- Create a copy of disk1, reformat. Copy disk2 onto disk1, reformat disk2, copy disk3 onto disk2 etc...

 

[SchizTech]

Never had a problem connecting an NTFS-formatted external drive to a Linux box (I use Linux Mint, and it auto-mounts them and reads/writes without a problem).

Hmm, perhaps it depends on distro. I hadn't observed *buntu to auto-mount them without editing fstab.

 

[skittle]

Ntfs has been stable(read and rw) on linux for many years. It's fine to use for data storage though ext4 or XFS is better for throughput. NTFS should not be used for /home or other unix mount point because NTFS does not support Unix file permissions! You can also get your self into trouble when mixing cases. Windows is not case sensitive but linux is so avoid having two directory/files with same name but with different case 😉
Also be aware that there are no good fsck for NTFS on linux and the advised method to run fsck is to plug it into a physical or (qemu or other) windows machine.
I would convert to ext or XFS if possible but it's not totally necessary

 

[giantbucket]

hmm... some valid points i hadn't considered, one being fsck and the other about if these might one day go back to a windows machine. i'm beginning to think i might stick with Windows for this!!! :/