My old WD My Cloud drive died due to a main board issue. Luckily, the NAS drive itself was fine. I bought a new WD 3TB My Cloud and used the USB socket to connect a docking station into it, having removed the HDD out of the old unit. I was then able to recover my files.
That’s the story waffle over with. My questions are:
a) What is the best format to use if I were to use the old NAS HDD as a backup unit ie using the UI to back from my new cloud device via USB? NTFS or a Linux based one?
b) Can I format the drive in situ or will I have to connect it into my PC in order to format it!
Bennor
I understand the formats that it could support. I was just wondering if I should choose a Linux based (ext4) over NTFS seeing as the WD My Cloud device runs on a Linus OS.
Depends how you think you might use the backup disk.
If you think you might want to connect it dtraight back to a PC, then maybe NTFS. Otherwise, one might expect ext4 to be better, being ‘native’ to the OS, and having fewer fragmentation issues.
I’ve never tested the relative performance of different USB filesystems, but it ought to be straightforward with something like Crystal Disk Mark. Format the drive, connect to MC, map network drive, run CDM, record results. Repeat for different FS. Choose best.
Like cpt_paranoia indicated it will depend on how you plan to use the backup disk. There is no one “best” format, rather which format will give you the most compatibility for your needs? Going to connect it to a Windows PC? Then use NTFS as most Windows PC’s do not have native Linux or Mac format support. Going to connect it to a Mac? Then HFS+J might be better. Going to connect it to Linux? Then go with EX4.
NTFS is typically what most newer external hard drives are formatted as out of the box. Older external hard drives tended to be FAT32, but FAT32 has a 4GB file size limitation which NTFS does not have. Most modern OS’s should be able to read/write to NTFS.
