Just started dumping data from my individual SSDs onto an old laptop one by one so I can reformat the drives as EXT4 instead of xFAT or FAT32 or whatever I had it as before. I wasn't aware that EXT4 was better suited for (and exclusive to) Linux until recently, and I'm still new to it. Is it much more efficient on storage space or something?
Like I said, I've been copying files to and from an old laptop that holds onto them while I format the drives, but this laptop is old af and takes several hours to copy 1TB, so I often leave it going while I sleep. I woke up this morning to no errors or anything, but the files copied to the drive were ~600gb worth when they were ~800gb before. Surely there isn't that much of a difference? Any idea what could be causing this?
Ext4 has better support for various things than FAT filesystems. It can manage longer filenames/paths, supports symlinks, has better privilege controls and so on. It's not much more efficient, but being a newer system than FAT32 there's some improvements on that too. So, in general it's newer tech and thus better than old one, not because it's built for Linux (or "unix-like" systems).
But for that size difference, unless you had millions (or tens of millions or more) very small files to copy and your block size on FAT32 was somehow funny, I don't see how that could shrink disk usage by that much. I assume there's some error on size calculations or something didn't copy over. Few hundred MBs might be possible, but 200GB is very, very unlikely. Actually I'm not sure if that's even theoretically possible.
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