Just started dumping data from my individual SSDs onto an old laptop one by one so I can reformat the drives as EXT4 instead of xFAT or FAT32 or whatever I had it as before. I wasn’t aware that EXT4 was better suited for (and exclusive to) Linux until recently, and I’m still new to it. Is it much more efficient on storage space or something?
Like I said, I’ve been copying files to and from an old laptop that holds onto them while I format the drives, but this laptop is old af and takes several hours to copy 1TB, so I often leave it going while I sleep. I woke up this morning to no errors or anything, but the files copied to the drive were ~600gb worth when they were ~800gb before. Surely there isn’t that much of a difference? Any idea what could be causing this?
Its less about efficiency and just about compatibility at least in terms of fat and ext4. Ext4 is open and was designed for Linux, where fat was for windows and was closed off and hard for Linux to support
I’m not sure about the file size diffs, maybe different default compression levels or a incomplete copy?
FAT predates Windows. Lol. I think you might be thinking NTFS? That has been a cluster duck. But FAT was never that difficult to support.
Oh you’re right yeah. I also saw an article also about exfat being opened source by Microsoft in 2019