hundido wrote: ↑Mon Jul 12, 2021 7:20 am
I found this article about ext3 vs ext4:https://www.golinuxhub.com/2014/03/what ... -ext3-and/
Learning a lot. Thanks for your responses, all of you.
@mikewalsh Could I ask, how are your personal storage drives formatted and what was your logic behind it? I want sda to be a personal storage drive. I'm doing the few Gib fat32 just in case and leaving it empty for the foreseeable future. Can I ask what you mean
Ext4 & 64-bit Puppies don't, apparently, play nice together (but I can't speak from experience.
? Do you mean, you should format the operating systems ext3 or data?
Does anyone have experience if ext4 works well as a personal storage drive file system when using 64-bit Puppy? What do you think?
@williwaw you said ext4. Do you use a 64 bit puppy? Does ext4 work well for you, if that's what you use?
It seems like ext4 is pretty standard these days? I'm wondering if newer file system/newer puppy might be the way to go since I have puppy on a newer computer?
Thanks,
Hi, hundido.
Mm. Well, I'm probably not the best person to ask this stuff.
Like you, when I first tried Linux - this was at EOL of XP, and I haven't looked back since - the whole business of needing to create & format partition was new to me, too. I'd never had to do this before; as the old saying goes, newcomers to Linux often spend more time in the first few months re-creating & re-formatting partitions, & re-installing Linux, than anything else.....simply due to making basic mistakes.
It's the quickest way to learn, though. And trust me, we've ALL been there. You can be as super-cautious as you like, and ask hundreds of questions, and read thousands of articles about it; I can guarantee you WILL mess something up the first couple of times around.
The best analogy, probably, would be.....well, try this for size. It's like a Brit visiting, say, the US or Australia; it's not that you don't understand the language.....what you don't fully understand is the way things work in their society. You stick out like a sore thumb, simply because you're not doing things in quite the same way as the natives; they do day-to-day stuff without even thinking about it, because it's second nature to them. And so it is with the move from Windows to Linux for many folks; you're coming from an environment where you get lots of hand-holding, & your system is regularly updated without you having to lift a finger.....to a different environment where, by its very nature, you're expected to do much of the basic work yourself - and the concepts are alien to you.
Enough of that.
Okay, to answer your question as well as I can, I have 2 HDDs in my HP tower. The 1 TB Toshiba was installed when I bought it; the 3 TB Seagate was installed by ME, and is basically the Seagate 'Barracuda' drive from inside what they sell as an external USB 3.0 desktop drive. It's not a 2.5" laptop-sized drive like they use in the small portable HDDs you can slip in your pocket, this is a 3.5" desktop-sized drive. I'd had it for a couple of years before buying this new HP tower 18 months ago; I came to the conclusion that by installing it internally, it would be one less piece of junk on my desk, and one less cable to plug in somewhere.....so that's what I did.
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The primary drive - the Toshiba (sda) is formatted like this:-
.....and the secondary drive - the Seagate (sdb, which IS my "data" drive) is formatted like this:-
As you can see, ext3 all the way.
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As to why I use Ext3 in preference to Ext4.....in my first few months of distro-hopping, I noticed that mainstream distros all used Ext4. I was going to use this for Puppy, but having a quick read round things & asking a couple of questions on the old forum before installing my first-ever Puppy, it seemed Ext3 was the preferred format to use.....so that's what used. And because it's never given me a moment's trouble in the several years I've run Puppy, I've stuck with it. Unlike Ext2, Ext3 is what's called a "journalling file-system" in the same way as Ext4; Ext4 is just a more recent version, with more features (and it uses up more of your disk space WITH those "features", it seems). Plus, it can support a larger number of far larger-sized volumes/partitions.
Journaling file-systems @ Wikipedia
Ext3 @ Wikipedia
Ext4 @ Wikipedia
(Interestingly, despite Ext4's wide-spread adoption - mainly, I think, because it's faster in operation than Ext3 - its developer described it as a "stop-gap", based on "old technology".....and still does, 13 years on.)
My view remains the same; for the majority of use-cases where people are likely to use Puppy, Ext3 is a perfectly stable, usable file-system. At the end of the day, both "3" and "4" will work; it largely boils down to personal choice.
Hopefully, some of my above blathering will help you to decide..! 
Mike. 
