Hi everyone. On Disks there are 3 formatting options: the "mbr/dos" one, the "modern systems >2tb" one and the "no partition" one. What is the best solution for Linux, Windows and data storage? Also i don't understand the kind of formattation (ex. Fat32, ext4) associated to these options. Thanks in advance for your help.
These three options refer to the partition table, which is a small section of the drive reserved to basically describe how the drive will be partitioned.
The Master Boot Record (MBR) is the old way of doing things. It has some limitations like the number of partitions that you can have, how large they can be, etc.
I don't remember what GPT stands for GUID Partition Table and is basically the upgrade and you should be using this unless you have some reason for it. Some old hardware doesn't support it very well, for example.
The third option of no partition will simply make the drive empty, removing whatever partition table already existed. I guess you can do this in an attempt to "clear" the drive if you're going to sell it and you don't want others to read the data in it. This doesn't actually erase the data, so don't rely on this for anything sensitive.
Once you have a partition, you still need to tell the drive how the files inside that partition will be stored. That's what the file system does. In Linux, for example, files have an associated piece of metadata used for things like permissions and ownership, which is different than how Windows does it.
EXT4 is the de-facto standard file system for most Linux distributions today, although there are others you might have heard of like BTRFS, ZFS, and many others.
NTFS is the one used by Windows, which I think replaced FAT32 on Windows around the 2000's. It actually still in use for things like SD Cards and some flash drives, since it's so compatible given it's been around for a long time.
For a flash drive or external drive you can just use NTFS, since it's so popular these days that in all likelihood all operating systems will be able to use it no problem. If you have problems with it, then FAT32.
On the other hand, if you're only going to be plugging this on Linux systems, or you mean to use the drive to install Linux, then choose EXT4.
If you need an example on how you can partition a drive (the details used here might not fit your exact needs, but it might still be helpful):
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Thank you for answering. But if i choose the second option it fits only for hard drives >2tb? Also If i understood: with 2 hard drives the system one (Linux) in ext 4 while the data one in Ntfs. Am i correct?
I guess I'm old guard. I never have anything bigger than 1 Tb HDD in my machine, including ones I put in the HotSwap bay of my tower. FAT32 or EXFAT was for early Windows machines (I think prior to that it was FAT16 for DOS). The princiipal difference between FAT32 and NTFS is the latter is a journaling system and was introduced primarily with Windows NT4 (NT standing for New Technology) which came out before Win2k and was mainly deployed on enterprise desktops. Similarly Ext3 and Ext4 are also journaling systems but are only found in GNU/Linux. To ensure fhat you don't have a misbehaving journaling system, the boot time should not be less than 5 seconds. When I was a self-employed IT contractor working for a local government's preferred IT provider, the NT Wizard informed me that a Director of one of the Council's departments had a habit of reducing the boot time of NT4 to 0 seconds which invariably could lead to an unstable system. Similarly with Ext4 FS, you should not set the GRUB timeout to less than 5 seconds either. You do need a FAT32 for ESP partition for EFI which should be a minimum of 300 Mb in size. If you are intereseted in creating a separate data partition for Zorin and Windows to have access, I created a tutorial video for it here:
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Thanks but things here are becoming too much difficult for me:).
I mean this. I have an old pc with an ssd and a mechanical drive. On ssd I want to put Zorin while keeping the mechanical one for storage. Surely i don't want to do dual boot. So my problem is about the kind of formattation of both disks. My idea is that the storage drive would eventually seen also by Windows.
OK, so Ext4 for the SSD and NTFS for the HDD - GNU/Linux can read and write to NTFS.
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Ok thank you
You can use any drive you want, and it will work fine. But if you have a drive with a capacity larger than 2 TB of storage, then you need to select this option to make use of all of it.
One of the limitations of MBR is that you can't create partitions larger than 2 TB; at the time this was an absurd amount of storage. With GPT this limit is expanded to what we now consider an absurd amount of storage: 64 ZB. I'm sure this will change sometime in the future...
It's perfectly fine to format a drive with this option even for drives that have a lower capacity than that, since there are other advantages. Like I said in my earlier post, this is what you should be using unless you have a good reason not to.
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Thank you, perfectly understood.
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