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.
1 Like
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.
1 Like
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.
1 Like
ex-FAT has issues with block size. Not as good at NTFS which is also more secure.
ext4 has to have a separate program to mount in Win 10 which I prefer not using.
I would strongly recommend NTFS, I found it to be very reliable and fast, but most importantly, you can access the drive from your local network as a network disk, so that if you want to add more music, you just copy it to this drive via network instead of having to pull it out and physically connect it to a computer. As far as I know, this works only with NTFS format.
You can access a drive shared over the network regardless of how it is formatted. The format is made irrelevant by the sharing software (Samba), which does the “talking” over the network. Here’s an article to read if you’re interested.
maybe so, but I could not get volumio out-of-the-box (I am not sure samba is preinstalled) to read/write to attached USB drive over the network unless it was NTFS, I could have been missing something
Sernyl, I have the experience but only VERY recent what might be called success,
I have USB HDD’s from 2TB - 8TB, currently I have a 6TB and a 4TB plugged into volumio for music,
After a lot of frustration (see my post about forgetting the FTP format) I finally formatted them both in ext4. For me the deciding factor was the fact that when I ‘sneaker net’ the drives to my home office where my primary os is Linux, I can plug and play and organize.
Where as there were always issues with windows pcs no matter WHAT I tried.
That being said, Im currently looking at setting up a second RASPI as a video server, sharing them to my win10 NUC.
Ive tried several different RPI OS’s and application images and none of them do a really good job decoding he various video formats I use,
In the past I was told I was askng too much of the ARM.
So directly connected to the RPI4, works great, sharing it out…not so good thus far…
Thank you Mindwave for the post.
May I cross post ? (I don’t remember the topic):
I finally managed to make Volumio recognize the whole USB disk (2 To) 
There were corrupted flac files, some of them having no tag.
After correction, and deletion of the so corrupted files, Volumio works like a charm, and I can even pilot it via my smartphone.
Now I just need alphabetical sort of the albums…
Regards,