Posted March 28, 2024
dtgreene: These days, I'd probably recommend exFAT if you need such a partition. (The former recommendation was fat32, but that doesn't support large files or partitions.)
If it isn't for large filenames, yeah. Otherwise depending on the size of the partition, Fat16 or Fat32 are still contenders (Fat12... yeah that iteration is fairly useless, almost better to use mkisofs or squashfs). On a ramdrive i've seen huge speedgains using Fat32 simply because it's a simpler Filesystem and it probably doesn't have to do any permission checks. On linux. Hmmm... Depends on the usecase. I've got some premade HUGE ext2 ramdisks that take up like 80k while unmounted and dormant, though they rely on zram in the instances i am extracting heavily redundant data for momentary processing. And the default tmpfs usually suffices.
The main FS the ext4 or whatever is the current, for shared might Samba it, for thumbdrives yeah same as you, Fat32 for small/medium drives (up to 16Gb) and exFat on everything else. Fat16 on up to 2Gb and Fat12 on up to 256Mb (Like you'll see those around anymore....)
Reminds me. A while back i had this 240Gb external, which was formatted to Fat32, and i couldn't transfer a bunch of files that were larger (think they were 5Gb each) during a backup on a computer. So i created enough 3-4Gb files and mounted it using zfs/RAID. I could copy files between the two linux computers. A workaround when you can't just flush/format the drive. That or 7zip and split into multiple files.