ext4 can't be natively mounted in Mac and Windows but you can install third party software and still mount it from the command line easily. And of course ext4 works fine with Linux natively.

I don't know if you can install the Mac OS or Windows OS on an ext4 drive and directly boot from it, however.

If you don't need to use it on Mac/Windows, use a FS like BTRFS with checksumming feature.

Don't use any FS that doesn't have checksum feature as silent bitrot is real.

I have had Wikipedia on my phone for years, local search is fast enough. I also recommend Wiktionary, which has practically every word in every language and is less than 10GB.

https://library.kiwix.org/#lang=eng

Must be an old design from around ~10 or so years ago. Acer I presume.

"need" according to what? If this is about writeback caching, you can turn that off manually for the disk. And isn't windows the only OS that disables it by default for removable disks?

> USB tools (like Rufus in default mode) create 512B-aligned images, but if the drive is 4Kn-only, GRUB or kernel can't read the filesystem.

> The lack of 512 support seems to be a issue on the newer lower-cost USB SSDs which are designed to just do NTFS file transfers on the go and not host an OS for boot.

Sounds like a rufus issue to me, rather than a hardware problem. It's been standard practice to align to larger values for a long time for performance reasons.

Specifically, flash drives typically set the removable media bit in their response to the SCSI INQUIRY command, which makes the OS believe they contain a medium that can be removed and replaced, like a floppy, "superfloppy" (Zip, LS-120, SyQuest, etc.), or optical drive.

This is why Windows, in particular, exhibits curious behavior when dealing with flash drives:

It assigns a drive letter to a flash drive even if it contains no partitions — MS-DOS and Windows floppies, "superfloppies", and optical media were traditionally unpartitioned.

It allows you to eject the "medium" from the drive — at which point it typically becomes unusable, like a floppy drive with no disk inserted, unless you have a way to send a START STOP UNIT command with the load eject bit set (e.g., the sg3_utils[1] sg_start command), which directs a removable drive to attempt to load the inserted medium (a tray-loading CD-ROM drive with an open tray will retract the tray and spin up the disc, if present; a tape drive capable of injecting an ejected tape will do so; a flash drive with nothing to physically eject will once again present as a drive with medium present).

Most usefully, it causes Windows to default to more conservative caching behavior that makes surprise removal safer (this can be changed for specific devices via Properties in Device Manager), and therefore doesn't display a warning when the drive is physically disconnected without requesting disconnection from the OS and waiting for the "safe to remove" notification.

[1] https://sg.danny.cz/sg/sg3_utils.html

One thing I forgot warn about, while this applies to every drive with data you care about, have automated and tested backups. SSDs can and will just up and die, and most drives these days are going to be completely unrecoverable in practice unless the issue is solder ball corrosion/breakage.

Basically, be prepared for that 8TB of data to go poof, where it’s in an enclosure or not.

If your drive is suddenly missing, you might need to reboot, or remove the device to drain power and try again, or use a different USB port. Rarely, drives need to get power cycled to recover from power loss (I’ve not had to do with with my dockcase enclosure, but did a few times prior in earlier enclosures). See https://dfarq.homeip.net/fix-dead-ssd/

Also stay away from cheap Samsung OEM drives on eBay, they have dogshit firmware that’s often been fucked with by whatever the vendor was, with no good way to get updates even if they exist. If your drive suddenly shows up as 1GB with the firmware version of “ERRORMOD” (“error mode”), it’s all gone.