Noticed one of my drive locations not available, so I went to check the USB 3.0 drives plugged into my Rock. One cannot be recognized by my Mac, the other can. Looks like a need to re-format the drive again. Similar to this same event two years ago with my unchanged system - (2) 12TB Seagate EXOS X12 connected direct to NUC.
What format should we be using for HDs that will connect to ROCK? exFAT? NTFS?
Drive corrupt:
Drive Ok (looks to be NTFS):
exFAT. See USB Storage - Best Practice on
Oh I forgot the best part, the NTFS drive shown above, no longer shows under ROCK Storage. Restarting ROCK multiple times.
Another option is Linux EXT4 and install Paragons’s commercial EXT4 driver on the Mac.
Repair the NTFS drive using a windows PC and chkdsk /f as described above, copy the music off it, reformat the drive as exFAT, and put the music back on it… never use NTFS again 
Thanks, I was able to format as EXT4 on my Mac and will write backups to both disks.
cheers
Is exFat the Roon recommendation?
exFat is great for cross platform transport of files. It is not, and should not be for actively storing your music library.
exFat lacks journaling. This is fine for files at rest, it is not and should not be used for something that’s actively written to or read from.
Why do you need journaling for reads? Media libraries are typically write once / read many and even the reads are rare compared to data actively used in computers (as meant by research and white papers using it). A media library looked at from such a standpoint is almost dead / immutable data.
But you should IMHO have a good backup of it because even if someone still posses the originals (CDs, LPs), most wouldn’t be willing to invest the time again to recreate their library in case of a fatal issue with their file-based library.
Unless ROCK truly does nothing with the drive, leaving it mounted read only or with noatime, data is written to a disk that’s mounted during some access.
Yeah and? That’s intended use of such devices. They can run for years doing just that – especially for a media library where there is no real load at all. In computer terms the disk has almost all time of the world to actualize the metadata associated to a read and even if such a metadata write would fail it wouldn’t affect the actual data. The biggest disadvantage I know of is that a filesystem check for a drive without journaling takes much, much longer than for a drive with. A mandatory filesystem check may happen after every unexpected shutdown (power interruption, …).
But ROCK is a special case of OS. It may not run file system checks anyway for any reason and may not make use of the journaling support of a given filesystem anyway (IIRC for the filesystems supported by Roon using a journal is optional if supported at all).
ROCK presumably mounts the filesystem as it’s formatted, if it was formatted with that option, it has journaling. I don’t know what parameters are used to mount however so they may be using noatime where applicable.
exFat isn’t a good option here, just my 2c. I use it all the time for sneakernet though.
The recommendation is actually a bit different just like @BlackJack already posted:
So what does that leave you with? exFAT if you require Win/Mac compatibility, or ext4 if you don’t. Just like the recommendation says. Or what’s your better idea?
In fact, exFAT is OK for the purpose. A journal is only useful if the machine crashes during a write. In the case of an audio file storage, in this case you can simply copy the files again.
I guess given the constraints you outlined it’s a fair choice. NTFS is not the right choice here because of the whole linux can’t really re-check situation, and you kinda lose most of the Windows crowd with ext4 as the alternative.
You know how many times I’ve had clients tell me I’m a magician for ‘fixing’ their nfts drive that didn’t eject properly? -_-
Search for @suedkiez and NTFS here on the forum and you know my pain
EXT4 created with Paragon on my iMac is not compatible for me. It’s a 12TB drive, not partitioned. Connected via USB 3 on the NUC. I’m just going to use exFAT I guess
Good idea 
