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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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.