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I just received a brand new hard drive that I had ordered the other day. It's a SATA internal drive. The model ID is ST3000DM008.

My plan is to load it up with large files on Windows, and then hook it up to my Linux server.

However, I have never hooked up a brand new drive in a Linux environment. I do know that Linux only recognizes certain file formats.

For what it's worth, my Linux OS is running on a separate hard drive as is, and I'm running Windows 10 on my other computer.

Do I have to format the drive before transferring it over from the Windows environment?

If I remember correctly, I think I read way back that FAT32 is compatible in both environments? But I just read that the largest files you can have in a FAT32 format is 4GB?

Is there any way to preserve the files that I will be putting on it from Windows?

oldboy
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Most likely the new disk is already formatted to NTFS.

You can leave it as is. Both Ubuntu and Windows can use this file system.

But NTFS works slower in Linux than native Linux formats. If this is critical it is better to use a Linux format, like ext4, xfs, btrfs, etc. You won't be able to fix errors on NTFS with Linux.

In general it is not recommended to use NTFS file system on Linux if you don't have Windows there.

Also make sure you turn off Windows properly before you take out the disk. Windows 10 is hibernated when you select "Shutdown".

Pilot6
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