Is it ok to swap over to Linux as long as the boot drive is reformatted as Ext4 but my storage drives are NTFS?
I have a Win 10 home theater pc that I use for plex and gaming. I want to swap over to Linux but my drives are formatted in NTFS. I have heard that while Linux can read and write NTFS, there is a possibility of corruption. I have a separate OS drive that I can reformat.
I really don’t have the spare cash right now to buy another HDD to pull over files before reformatting my current drives.
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v6.14-rc6/filesystems/ntfs3.html
Note if you are sharing it with windows MS could update or change something that could corrupt the data. Always have backups.
I would be running Linux only with Windows completely removed.
Corruption is unlikely, but permissions might be a problem.
How much free space do you have? You might be able to shrink the NTFS and create another (I usually use xfs for data partitions), copy the data, then delete NTFS and expand xfs to full size.
I have around 8 TB free. I have linked what I have in other replies.
NTFS works fine for the last decade or so. Works fine until it doesn’t. And this is where your problems begin: if something went terribly wrong, you lack the tools to fix that. Also, as I heard, there are still serious problems with storing programs on NTFS: some crazy unexpected things happen even in Win-programs run through Wine. Not your situation, but still.
I would avoid NTFS if possible. Nothing good will come from that.
This is what my searching has panned out to be. If I completely removed Windows from my system and do not run any programs from the NTFS drives, does my risk go down?
Issue is that I have around 30 TB of data and so getting a drive to shuffle data while reformatting instantly puts me in the $250+ range which isn’t really possible right now.
Are the data drives completely full? If not, you could potentially shrink the partition using something like GParted, then create a new ext4 or whatever file system you want with the newly unallocated space. Then, move some data from the ntfs partition to the new ext4 partition. Once the new partition is full, shrink the ntfs one, expand the ext4 one, and copy over more data. It’ll probably be tedious, but it should be doable and save you from having to buy a new drive.
They’re not, and I can get one drive for sure formatted with transferring. I do get concerned with large scale transferring and worrying that the drive will die lol
Well, if those are just videos or other such data then you’re almost perfectly safe. Almost.
If you describe what and how many disks you have, maybe we would be able to figure out some cheap walkaround?
Essentially I have two primary storage drives of 8 and 18 TB. The other storage drives are my old drives that I’m not worried about.
I see, I hoped you have just a bunch of smaller disks.
Do you have another Win-machine where you can mount those disks if in need of maintenance (this need might never actually happen!)? If yes, then just move to Linux and everything will be ok.
I have another pc that I could do that but I was looking at bringing it over to Linux too. I guess I could have that stay on Windows until I obtain another drive.
The biggest issue that I ran into when I was using NTFS drives with Linux was caused by unclean drive dismounts. After power outages, forced shutdowns, or manually pulled drives (I am the problem sometimes), the NTFS drive would sometimes fail to mount properly unless I connected it to a Windows computer and scanned the drive for errors first. Not the end of the world if you have backups and a Windows computer handy, but pretty terrible if you don’t have both.
Hmm ya, that’s definitely a concern in my location. Power goes out several times a year here, even if it’s just momentarily long enough to power off the PC. I should have a UPS but never had the spare cash to throw at that.
To be fair, power loss is a concern for any setup. More recent copy-on-write filesystems are supposed to be a bit more resilient…but I also worry about the lack of a long-term reliability track record for newer filesystems like BTRFS. The long term solution, like more than one other poster has indicated, is having multiple backups.
I would just make sure you’re only READING from the NTFS volume. Writing to NTFS is technically supported, but due to the nature of the filesystem, it will run into errors at some point as others may have mentioned.
