Format for New external hard drive

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xilixi
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Joined: 11/28/2013

I guess it won't work out of the box in Trisquel, so I was wondering what to do after purchasing it. Should I format the hard drive in FAT, NTFS or EXT4?
I think formatting in EXT4 is a bad idea because of compabilities problems, eapecially if plugging the unit to Windows systems. What do you.think?

Magic Banana

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Joined: 07/24/2010

The disk will work out of the box. If you want Windows to read/write the disk too, then, yes, you need to choose one of the few filesystem Windows can natively read/write: FAT or NTFS. That means no POSIX permissions.

Be aware that files on a FAT filesystem cannot exceed 4 GiB, a pretty stringent constraint nowadays. I would therefore choose NTFS if I were you... and the disk will probably already come with an NTFS filesystem.