My concern is that I don't understand why all of the instructors/writers format the external drives as EXT4 not xFAT or NTFS, can someone explain that to me, please ?
Sure.
Clients accessing over Samba (and most other network protocols) don't know and don't care what the underlying filesystem is. FAT, exFAT, and NTFS are windows formats and do not support many Linux features such as owner, group, and permissions. That makes some things more or less impossible and some things much harder than they otherwise would be.
Further, depending on the choice of driver, NTFS can be slow though given the limit is the network connection clients may not notice.
The only time I would use FAT, exFAT, or NTFS on Linux is if I need to physically disconnect that drive from the Pi and connect it to a machine (e.g. a windows box) that can only cope with those formats.
If you need something that's (close to) universal, use FAT32.
I have all kind of devices on my home network, Android, iOS, MACOS and Windows, and for most of my external storage devices I use exFAT since it is readable by all systems, so I am wondering if I still can use the same file system (exFAT) with SMB on Raspberry to share files from external USB stick/drive
As I said above, file system is entirely irrelevant to client devices. Only the server deals directly with it.
If there is a recommended detailed guide on how to achieve my goal please share
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Building A Pi Based NAS
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Statistics: Posted by thagrol — Sat Dec 07, 2024 6:12 pm
