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Hi
I keep my Music Library on a 512GByte USB drive. I have been having problems with Volumio not finding the USB drive after power down via the GUI. Today it appears that the USB has totally died / or corrupted so I can not use it. My question is I think the previous USB drive was formatted in windows exFAT, when I get a replacement is it more likely to be reliable if I formatted it in ext4 ? format, assuming my problems were due to using a large USB drive formatted in exFAT ?.
I’m not sure about the benefit or otherwise of exFAT or ext4.
I’ve been using a 1TB 2.5" USB drive (spinning platter) for about 5 years without any issues, it’s formatted FAT32 (by a Windows PC) and has never had any issues.
It is connected to my R Pi3B+ running Volumio and is always on, it only goes off when there is a power outage or similar.
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To answer my own question ext4 format does not work with USB drives and voliumio. I tried it and was unsuccessful, so I reformatted it with 32 bit FAT which worked successfully.
I’ve used ext4 filesystems for my USB-mounted music libraries under volumio for years (never used any version of FAT). There’s never been a problem (volumio is a Debian-derivative OS after all). I think it’s officially not recommended because you need to have a basic understanding of file and directory permissions, but that’s not the same as `does not work’.
Fat32 or NTFS is the easiest way to access the drive.
If you go for EXT4, you must understand rights and permissions.
That explains why EXT4 it did not work for me, and would have an easier fix than reformatting the USB drive, may be more info on using USB drives in the user documentation would be useful, if only a more details about using EXT4.
This is very basic Linux knowledge. If this raises questions, you’re better of using FAT or NTFS.
Supporting this is for me to time consuming. This time is better spend to support Volumio.
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Adding ‘If using EXT4 make sure that the file permissions are correct’ in to the documentation is not a big overhead and would help people.