FTC
Senior Member
I have used EXT3 and NTFS on my 1TB external drive drive. Decided to stick with NTFS as I saw no performance increase with EXT3. Am using a USB2 enclosure.
One recommendation is to use a thumb drive in the other USB slot and add a swap file. If you format the thumb drive to EXT2 or EXT3 it can be used for Entware. I am doing that to run Transmission which writes the downloaded files to my 1TB drive.
If you want a good utility to format drives use Gparted https://gparted.org/ Write it to a live CD or a thumb drive. Yumi is a good tool to make a thumb drive bootable https://www.pendrivelinux.com/yumi-multiboot-usb-creator/ I carry a 64 GB thumb drive with me that has Gparted, Clonezilla and a couple varieties of Linux that I can use to boot a computer.
Absolutely agree with the thumb drive suggestion. This is in fact also my scenario, but also with the compatibility risks of NTFS if you connect the drive directly to a real windows machine mentioned in Colin's post.. maybe the only thing nowadays to worry about a bit.