OK, my USB spinning disk formatted exfat with no partition table needs to be reformatted. I include quotes of my web searches in case anybody feels they gave me flawed results.
Preview question: NB, I am considering some flavor of Solaris for my future fileserver, so the ability to read and if possible write (for backups) from there is a requirement. subsequent queries specifically for writing seemed to confuse solaris with linux....
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- aix provides support for the volumes used in IBM’s AIX (which introduced what we now know as LVM);
- amiga provides support for the Amiga’s RDB partitioning scheme;
- bsd provides support for BSD disk labels;
- dvh provides support for SGI disk volume headers;
- gpt provides support for GUID partition tables;
- mac provides support for old (pre-GPT) Apple partition tables;
- msdos provides support for DOS-style MBR partition tables;
- pc98 provides support for PC-98 partition tables;
- sun provides support for Sun’s partitioning scheme;
- loop provides support for raw disk access (loopback-style) — I’m not sure about the uses for this one.
As you can see, the majority of these are for older systems, and you probably won’t need to create a partition table of any type other than gpt or msdos.
For a new disk, I recommend gpt: it allows more partitions, it can be booted even in pre-UEFI systems (using grub), and supports disks larger than 2 TiB (up to 8 ZiB for 512-byte sector disks). Actually, if you don’t need to boot from the disk, I’d recommend not using a partitioning scheme at all and simply adding the whole disk to mdadm, LVM, or a zpool, depending on whether you use LVM (on top of mdadm or not) or ZFS.
Huh? OK, probably not for a USB disk, but what is this about mdam? My next project (and why I need these disks to clear and move files) is creating a software raid fileserver, so will need to understand this
Since these are 4 TB disks, gpt it is?.
Unrelated bonus question: i had thought sun WAS the same as gpt, are they close to being the same? I remember that sun put a fingerprint on raid drives, physically move them around and it would recognize them wherever they appeared, and if one re-appeared was automatically resynced, is that unique to sun, or is that a unix programming function?
2. what filesystem? am I confused, is exfat older than ntfs?
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NTFS and exFAT are both file systems with different characteristics, including:
Compatibility
NTFS is only read-only on a Mac, while exFAT has read/write compatibility with macOS. ExFAT is also more broadly compatible than NTFS, and works with all versions of Windows and modern versions of macOS.
File size
exFAT has a maximum file size of 128 petabytes, while NTFS is designed to perform well on very large hard disks.
Features
NTFS includes features like access control lists (ACLs), filesystem encryption, transparent compression, and volume shadow copy. exFAT lacks some of the newer features of NTFS, like journaling and encryption.
Speed
When using an external drive system, exFAT may be the faster option than NTFS.
Use cases
NTFS is better for internal drive file systems, while exFAT is better for external drives and storing and writing larger files on multiple devices.
Storage devices
exFAT is optimized for flash drives, and is the default file system for SDXC and SDUC cards larger than 32 GB.
so, exFAT? I think I used NTFS in the past when I wanted to share a partition between windows and linux (for a dual boot system). While I don't expect to ever need access from IOS, it might be better for that reason too. Not FAT32 because of a file size limit of 4 GB, potentially smaller than a DVD image.
do either or both retain the linux read/write/execute permissions, even partially (since ownership is hard to maintain across systems)? or some other filesystem that fulfills my other requirements?
--Carey, Mainframe ex-pat...