Are Western Digital drives trustworthy these days. If I want to buy a pretty big non-flash hard drive for "backup and throw in a drawer" purposes, is this a good choice

https://www.amazon.ca/Elements-Portable-External-Drive-WDBU6Y0050BBK-WESN/dp/B07X41PWTY

Amazon.ca

ME: I want a 5 TB hard drive

Amazon: We can do that

Canada Computers: I can give you 12 TB for twice the price

Christine: Wait, Canada Computers has 12 TB drives for *how* much? Get two

Me, walking back from yonge-dundas square the next morning, absolutely twisted, carrying 24 TB of platter drives:

Hey if I want to format an HD for archival purposes, and I want it to be accessible from both Windows* and Linux** without problems, do I use… exfat? Will exfat freak out if I format it at absurdly high sizes like 12 TB, or give me an annoyingly high "minimum file size" or something? Are there any more-reliable/journaled FSes that both these OSes are happy with?

* 10
** Let's say Debian Trixie

Okay but seriously: Should I NTFS? People are saying the Linux NTFS driver is "pretty good" "perfectly adequate" is "adequate" what I'm looking for with my backup HD

https://toot.dusepo.co.uk/@Foritus/116155362354958361

Charlotte (@[email protected])

@[email protected] chaos option: ntfs as the Linux ntfs driver is pretty good these days.

Trunkington Farms
@mcc
I've spent so long struggling with it being slow and awful I can't be arsed with it now even *if* if has improved.
I tried exfat for a while but window's support is absolute crap, so that entire format is a waste of time.
I'm running btrfs on live drives and ext4 on storage drives. If Btrfs fuck up kernel submissions again I'm back to ext4 everywhere.
If I *have* to get data on Windows I'll use one of my crappy old small usb keys with fat32 and split archives that come close to the 4Gb limit