Hello,
Maybe this “problem” has been discussed before, at least I can’t figure it out.
I have Volumio on a Raspberry pi 4. Now I want to connect an HDD (2 TB) with music. How should this HDD be formatted? Is FAT32 the best choice? I read that a PI cannot handle NTFS and exFAT. The bad thing is that Windows 10 doesn’t want to format it in FAT32 …
I like to hear experiences and advice.
Regards,
Patrick
Well, I think NTFS is more efficient for storage as the block size is smaller than FAT32 which makes it more efficient. It seems many people were having issues with FAT32 USB being recognized by Volumio but after a reformat to NTFS had no issues.
Thank you for the respond.
But NTFS with an Raspberry, Raspberry can only read and not write? Or am i wrong?
just keep it fat-32 it seems the way to go…
The disk was exfat and is now (all afternoon) formatting to fat32. But NTFS is also possible? (Volumio on an Rpi 4) Would that be more useful maybe with file names?
fat-32 seems to have the best support
Then i keep it Fat32 for now. 
FAT32 will do long file names also but…
FAT32 has a limit on file size 4 GB maximum file size, 8 TB maximum partition size.
File or Folder? …a 4 Gb track… ? Never saw those…
ntfs is nice for movies on a windows machine but i never made a remix of 4gb yet…
File. 4 GB is not hard with an ISO file from an SACD.
Default cluster size for NTFS, FAT, and exFAT (microsoft.com)
sacd if you prefer that i would not spend my money on it…
For ripped CDs in flac or mp3 FAT32 works fine! Tryed NTFS and exFAT - got problems like no found disc/media! Back to FAT32 and that’s it!
If it’s a hdd drive dedicated to Volumio, then why not use ext4? It should be quicker, and is not subject to the fragmentation suffered by Windows filesystems.
So much theoretical discuss…
WHO has a REAL experience of using 2 or 4 TB USB HDD ?
I dont see them here…
I tried FAT32, NTFS, I kept only flac and jpg on the disk, I cleared unusual file names : nothing !
BW I tried an other disk : nothing 
“update” sees some files then back to none.
You could also use exFAT which doesn’t have the 4GB limit. You would need to SSH into the Pi and install exfat-fuse and exfat-utils.
Why not use ext4? It handles large drive and partition sizes. is extremely fast and efficient. Some issues mounting it to Windows 10, but there are drivers one can use.
ex-FAT has issues with block size. Not as good at NTFS which is also more secure.
