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For exchange and travel, I have an external USB HDD with a single partition (for compatibility with specific devices, e. g. a smart TV). Most of the existing content are video files between c. 100 MB and 2 GB. To make read and write operations more efficient, I figured that a large cluster size should be beneficial, thus had chosen 4 MB when I formatted it. Therefore, small files waste a lot of space.
I now want to put some audio files onto the drive, mostly full albums consisting of a dozen or so tracks each or audiobooks with one file per chapter, and almost all of them are still in MP3 format. They may come with cover images and playlists. Since I will usually listen to all parts in sequence, Iʼm considering to store them either in (uncompressed) ZIP archives or in MP4 containers in order to minimize wastage.
Which solution is likely to be more compatible across devices, operating systems and playback apps? Is there perhaps a better alternative I have not considered?
Crissov
Posted 2020-01-30T14:37:58.483
Reputation: 150
1The absolute most compatible option would be reformatting the drive with a sensible cluster size, anything else is going to be guesswork based on a million versions of software and operating system and their interactions. – Mokubai – 2020-01-30T15:08:14.780