I read on the arch wiki that it is not recommended to partition a disk before creating the ZFS filesystem on it. I searched but did not find any such statement about ext4.
So my questions:
- Can I put a ext4 filesystem on a disk for storage (not a root partition of a system) without partitioning it?
- What are the drawbacks?
Best Answer
Not required, but you should partition. The partition table eats up very little space, but it is universally recognizable. Windows will know that there's a filesystem there if you put it in a Windows box. If you have no partitions, other operating systems will just treat it as an empty drive.