I need to replace the hard drive of my Channels DVR that is running on RPi4. What format should I use on the new drive? Do I need to add some folders to the drive, or will it take care of that automatically?
NTFS or exFAT
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Do I need to add some folders to the drive, or will it take care of that automatically?
Just format it and that's it
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Wouldn't it be better to use a format that didn't originate with Microsoft? I am using xfs as it came with Scribe from HDHR and I just lifted it from there and put it into RPi 4.
I would think the OS you are running on the RPi4 would dictate the format of the attached HDD. If you are familiar with Linux, the newly released Ubunbtu 22.04 has a RPi4 specific installation image; you would format the disk as EXT4.
BTW, Channels DVR server runs very well under Ubuntu Linux. Very stable.
Personally, I find Ext4 to be the best suited.
Those tend to work well-ish if you use Windows, but the drivers on Linux aren't the greatest. And on BSD systems, the support is even worse.
My question: Are you planning on using these drives exclusively with your DVR, or sharing with a different machine? If using different machines, ExFAT may work. Otherwise, stick to Ext4. (I have experienced write and sync failures using XFS, so I tend to not recommend that FS.)
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Linux kernels 5.15 and above have much improved NTFS support with Paragon releasing its commercial NTFS drivers to Linux. 5.15 has been released but not all distros have been updated with it (do a "uname -r" to check). In 2019 Microsoft supported the release of exFAT to the Linux kernel but I don't know what the status of that is.
Only sort of ... Paragon basically gave their code to the kernel, and then essentially abandoned it.
Well, if you look at the Linux kernel mailing list linked to in the Phoronix article, a Paragon representative does reply:
First and foremost I need to state that active work on NTFS3 driver has never stopped, and it was never decided to "orphan" NTFS3. Currently we are still in the middle of the process of getting the Kernel.org account. We need to sign our PGP key to move forward, but the process is not so clear (will be grateful to get some process desciption), so it is going quite slow trying to unravel the topic.
As for now, we can prepare patches/pull requests through the github, and submit them right now (we have quite a bunch of fixes for new Kernels support, bugfixes and fstests fixes) -- if Linus approves this approach until we set up the proper it.kernel.org repo.
Also, to clarify this explicitly: in addition to the driver, we're working of ntfs3 utilities as well.
Overall, nevertheless the NTFS3 development pace has been slowed down a bit for previous couple of months, its state is still the same as before: it is fully maintained and being developed.
And finally, we apologize for late reply; I allowed me short vacation after most restrictions because of covid ended up this month in Germany.
It sounds like the normal bureaucracy and spin-up issues for new kernel developers to me.
It turns out I was wrong about the NTFS3 driver being Paragon's commercial code. According to a FAQ on their site (https://www.paragon-software.com/us/home/ntfs3-driver-faq/ ) Paragon wrote the NTFS3 driver for Linux from scratch and it's a different code base from their commercial driver. The FAQ also says Paragon is committed to maintaining the Linux NTFS3 driver.