Recommended format for external hard disk

[Tim]

On Mon, 2014-09-22 at 10:23 +0100, Paul Smith wrote:
> I gave just bought an external disk to be used on machines running
> Fedora. Which format would you recommend to format the disk? And what
> steps should I follow?

More information might help get better answers.  Such as whether you're
after fastest speed, or best reliability, having available tools to be
able to rescue data, only ever intending to use the drive with Fedora,
or maybe being compatible with other OSs...

I've just used ordinary ext3 with my drives, since it's simple to deal
with, and I don't require them to be readable by Windows, at all.

You can use tools like gparted to give you a reasonably simple interface
to prep the drive (partition, name, format), from the one program.

A bit of advice:  Format the entire drive, and check it for errors.
Better to spend the (annoying amount of) time to do this before you
begin using the drive, than to use it for several months before you come
across a seriously bad part of the drive, then have to deal with backups
and trying to return a bad drive.

Another bit:  Drives aren't as robust as people might think.  The laptop
size drives are meant to be portable, the desktop size drives are meant
to be left alone.  That not only means don't move them while they're
running, but that carrying a stopped drive, and thumping it about, like
any other ordinary object, doesn't do much good for its health.

-- 
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