what is the best file system for a game drive?
just added a second cheap NVMe drive to my system and am in the process of moving my games folder to it. the folder has a coupla prefixes and individual game folders. presently it's ext4, my boot drive is btrfs and encrypted LVM, the ext4 drive gets mounted to ~/Games via fstab.
is there a better combination? like, would I benefit from CoW or compression for this use case? or even going with ntfs?
edit: went with btrfs. super easy to convert from ext4, just unmount the 2nd drive, btrfs-convert and change the UUID in fstab. also added the compress=zstd:1 option. looks like everything is working thus far.
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I've used btrfs for gaming and deduping in particular helps a lot with steam prefixes since it's a lot of individual folders with similar files. I don't have hard data but the before and after comparison I've made after getting my deck from ext4 to btrfs left me more than satisfied. I'd guess compression doesn't hurt either, although again I don't have actual numbers.
Using BTRFS too. The only issue I've had with it w/r/t gaming was that huge game updates tended to take a lot of space in old snapshots, so I ended up putting my steam library in a non-snapshotted subvolume.
Right, that's a great tip! I usually use secondary, non snapshotted discs for storage so it didn't occur to me.
You can also just not use snapshots on your Steam dir, just make it a subvolume.
right, forgot about deduping, that is a huge factor!
Yup, it's great! I know btrfs not supporting case folding can be an issue with some games but I personally haven't encountered any so it works for me. Can always come up with a spare ext4 partition with it on if I absolutely need it at some point, I guess.