Is exFAT the best option for data drives/partitions on a dual boot system?

[Onions]

I'm currently using Windows only, but I have a spare 500GB SSD and was thinking of installing Ubuntu on it and dual booting.

 

I also have a 2TB SSD for my Steam Library, and three HDDs for bulk storage of music, photos, movies, documents etc. They are all currently using NTFS.

 

I already have a Windows/Manjaro dual boot set up on my laptop, so I understand that Linux can read and write to NTFS partitions, however I have noticed that using files from the NTFS partition in Manjaro can sometimes lead to them becoming corrupted. After doing a bit of research, it appears this is a relatively common issue with using NTFS with Linux, as the format is not open source and the Linux drivers are reverse-engineered and not completely stable. I also found that Microsoft has made the exFAT specification open, so it will work properly in Linux and other OSes, but has some disadvantages versus NTFS and ext4.

 

I don't care about being able to access the Linux drive from Windows, so I will be using ext4 for that, but I do want the three data HDDs, and idealy the Steam Library SSD to be usable by both operating systems without files getting corrupted. Is exFAT the only real option for the drives to be fully compatible with both operating systems, or is there another one that I'm not aware of?

[Kilrah]

Yeah, still the most compatible, but also not the most reliable.

 

I would keep the important documents NTFS and mount that read-only on linux, and have one exfat drive for steam and as "exchange" between the 2. But then I'm mostly using Windows and when I'm on linux I usually can do with only reading the Windows docs.

[OhioYJ]

Going to go knock on wood, but I always just use NTFS on my data drives, never been an issue. Even on Linux only PCs.

[Ralphred]

6 hours ago, OhioYJ said:

but I always just use NTFS on my data drives

Since the ntfs3 driver is now built into the kernel (compared to the old fuse based ntfs3g driver) NTFS is my filesystem of choice for "shared partitions".

 

Before that I used ext4 and the Ext2Fsd driver in windows, but modern ntfs3 is better. That said the Ext2Fsd is fine if you need to occasionally access a primarily linux drive in windows. exFAT was always a shitshow for meaningful usage.