I am wondering if there is a benefit for ROCK using exFat filesystem on the internal data drive instead of formatting it to ext4. exFat is already supported on drives connected via USB interface and so why not use it for internal drive as well ? Its easy to manage this drive, use it in Windows systems, etc. Moreover, if I change the drive to a bigger capacity or if this drive crashes, its easy to manage and prepopulate the files externally on the new one.
Any thoughts ?
Ext4 is native Linux, exFat is not.
I understand but my question was is there a benefit to having ext4 versus exFat ?
Well, ext4 is a journaling file system and it is rock solid, no pun intended. And I believe it gives a faster response. exFat does not journal and is used for external drives. Also, I have not tried it, but, I have heard that if you format an internal drive as exFat in Linux, it will not be readable in a windows environment.
What is journaling? I’ll copy pasta and then give the link…
“Journaling is designed to prevent data corruption from crashes and sudden power loss. Let’s say your system is partway through writing a file to the disk and it suddenly loses power. Without a journal, your computer would have no idea if the file was completely written to disk. The file would remain there on disk, corrupt.”
Thanks! yeah, I am aware of journaling fs. Does all these performance matter in audio application ? Would exFat be that slow compare to ext4 ? To look it in a different way, is Roon recommending now to use internal storage for ROCK ? I gather from previous posts that Roon’s recommendation is to use external USB drives to NUC formatted to exFat. Nevertheless, I am looking for better audio quality, performance and usability - I don’t mind one filesystem vs other if that is what is takes to make it work the best 
No, AFAIK, Roon has not officially recommended a specific storage option (internal storage, USB attached storage or NAS) as best. I personally use a NAS to store my music and just point the ROCK server at it. I then use a locally attached usb drive as a database backup location, not really to store music.