# External SSD/HDD filesystem type?
**URL:** https://discuss.freedombox.org/t/external-ssd-hdd-filesystem-type/890
**Category:** Support
**Created:** [May 8, 2020, 10:09pm UTC](https://discuss.freedombox.org/t/external-ssd-hdd-filesystem-type/890 "2020-05-08T22:09:26Z")
**Posts on this page:** 7
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@balduin](https://discuss.freedombox.org/u/balduin)
#### Post date: [May 8, 2020, 10:09pm UTC](https://discuss.freedombox.org/t/external-ssd-hdd-filesystem-type/890/1 "2020-05-08T22:09:26Z")
What filesystem type should an external hard drive have? The root partition uses `brtfs`. However, `ext4` will probably work better for HDDs and works for SSDs as well.
Should the hard drive filesystem type be `brtfs`, `ext4` or something entirely different?
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### Author:  [@jvalleroy](https://discuss.freedombox.org/u/jvalleroy)
#### Post date: [May 9, 2020, 3:29pm UTC](https://discuss.freedombox.org/t/external-ssd-hdd-filesystem-type/890/2 "2020-05-09T15:29:58Z")
I’m using ext4.
I understand with btrfs, there is some way to extend the subvolume to include both disks for snapshotting. But I didn’t really have a need for this.
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### Author:  [@balduin](https://discuss.freedombox.org/u/balduin)
#### Post date: [May 9, 2020, 4:59pm UTC](https://discuss.freedombox.org/t/external-ssd-hdd-filesystem-type/890/3 "2020-05-09T16:59:42Z")
Michael Larabel from Phoronix does regular benchmarks of different filesystem types:
- [Linux 5.0 File-System Benchmarks: Btrfs vs. EXT4 vs. F2FS vs. XFS](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux-50-filesystems&num=1)
- [Linux 4.16 File-System HDD & SSD Tests With EXT4/F2FS/Btrfs/XFS](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux-416-fs&num=1)
According to the benchmarks Ext4 is still the best mainstream option. Btrfs is usually the slowest.
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### Author:  [@Sunil](https://discuss.freedombox.org/u/Sunil)
#### Post date: [May 11, 2020, 6:06pm UTC](https://discuss.freedombox.org/t/external-ssd-hdd-filesystem-type/890/4 "2020-05-11T18:06:33Z")
Most file system should be supported. In particular, we will in future test for and try to support sharing and storage on NTFS and FAT filesystems due to their popularity.
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### Author:  [@NickA](https://discuss.freedombox.org/u/NickA)
#### Post date: [May 13, 2020, 8:08pm UTC](https://discuss.freedombox.org/t/external-ssd-hdd-filesystem-type/890/5 "2020-05-13T20:08:52Z")
> [@balduin](#):
>
> `ext4` will probably work better for HDDs and works for SSDs as well.
I’d go for btrfs, but look out for the particular caveats in its wiki, like
I think recent btrfs is also fine for SSD (but using daily fstrim, instead of a mount -o discard), what’s the issue you had in mind?
Where requiring the speed of legacy filesystems, mount a filesystem with -o nodatasum (disables checksumming) or even nodatacow (with crash risks).
However, database files and vm disk images always require: chattr -C (nodatacow on dir applied before image file creation!), qcow2: cluster\_size=8K (but they may bring their own checksum, atomicy, and snapshots)
The best benefit is the possibility to make instant snapshots and being able to _ **very** _ efficiently send/receive them over to other (eg. backup or peer) machines with btrfs in no-time.
(Think desktop ↔ NAS ↔ laptop/mobile, especially!)
But keep number of snapshots as low as reasonable, to avoid performance issues.
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### Author:  [@NickA](https://discuss.freedombox.org/u/NickA)
#### Post date: [May 24, 2020, 9:14pm UTC](https://discuss.freedombox.org/t/external-ssd-hdd-filesystem-type/890/6 "2020-05-24T21:14:52Z")
This seems to say btrfs has crash-risk safety whereas ext still has a remaining risk:
[https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/464383](https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/464383)
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### Author:  [@dalaeance](https://discuss.freedombox.org/u/dalaeance)
#### Post date: [September 1, 2020, 3:39am UTC](https://discuss.freedombox.org/t/external-ssd-hdd-filesystem-type/890/7 "2020-09-01T03:39:59Z")
Does this mean that NTFS- and FAT-based drives aren’t supported? I connected an SSD formatted to EXFAT, but it’s not being recognized by the Freedombox. It used to be formatted with APFS, and was recognized then, but I wiped it and formatted it to EXFAT so I could use it with Windows and Mac (to make adding media easier for me).
I checked if Debian supports EXFAT, and it does. I followed steps to install `exfat-fuse` and `exfat-utils`, but the terminal said they were already installed. I’m not sure what’s going on.
Any insight you can provide would be helpful.
- FreedomBox is plugged into a router at home
- Pretty sure I bought it sometime last year.
- I’m running Debian GNU/Linux 10 (buster) and FreedomBox version 20.12.1. FreedomBox is up to date.