Recommended USB drive format

[Heeter]

Hi all,

I finally bunch a handful of these 2TB USB HDs with a "USB3.0" cord

I am on Debian12 defualt out of the box with all the regular updates on a laptop that has USB3 ports

What formatting should I use on the USB drives to get the fastest transfer rates successfully?

I am moving around 400Gig folders with lots of big and tiny files.

Currently tested with moving 100Gigs of files and folders in FAT32 format, and getting 24MB/sec. Thinking that it should be able to do better, don't know.

Will not be using these drives on any Windows/MAC machines at any point, just on my main Debian12 laptop

Regards

[sunrat]

The speed of the drive itself is more important than USB speed. Using a SATA3 HD should be able to transfer at well over 100MB/s. Lots of small files will be slower than a few large files.
I have several SATA3 drives in USB3 enclosures formatted with ext4 which get up to 130MB/s.
FAT32 or NTFS will be slower, so use ext4 if you don't need Windows compatibility.

[Heeter]

Ok Thank you

Will reformat to ext4

Regards

[friendlysalmon88]

If you want maximum interoperability between Ms,OS X and Linux it is recommended that you use exfat as i not only can handle bigger storage volumes but is also the most interoperable between modern day operating systems.