EXT4 instead of FAT32 - External USB.

windg

i want to format my external USB storage to ext4 file system instead of FAT32.
This change can cause functionality problems in the RetroPie ?

Thanks.

mitu

It should work in RetroPie, but you'll not be able to read it or write to it from Windows.

steeeb

I've used an EXT4 drive (I just mount it in fstab over /home/pi/RetroPie) for years without issue over various versions on various hardware (XU4, Pi3b, 3b+, 4b).

windg

Regarding permissions, sudo chown -R pi:pi /media/usb0
is enough or i have to do something more ?

Thanks!

Clyde

@windg I don't think so. At least I didn't do anything more with my ext4 usb ssd. Here's the relevant part of my fstab:

PARTUUID=2c31bca2-b1f4-4466-ab20-3a347852ba2c   /media/usb0             ext4 defaults,noatime   0 1
/media/usb0/roms                                /home/pi/RetroPie/roms  none bind,bg            0 0

Some notes:

I generally prefer UUIDs over device names (e.g. /dev/sda1) in the case that the latter is changed by the system someday for reasons™ (or perfidy 😛 ).
I'm using two mounts, because my drive has a roms directory that I mount in ~/RetroPie/roms (with the option bind that mounts directories in directories) after mounting the drive itself in /media/usb0. I did that to be able to have other directories on the drive as well, since its 250 GB exeed the size of my rom collection by far.
The option bg should tell the system to retry the second mount in the background, in case the first mount isn't completed yet. But I'm not sure this option is still viable in the current version of mount/fstab.