Can you explain what you mean by "portable data storage"? I'm used to hearing the word "portable" used to mean "cross platform", but if it is not supported well under Linux, then given how widely used Linux is, I would think ntfs would not count as cross platform.
I'm pretty sure that the grandparent meant portable quite literally, as in you can take it with you. Things like USB sticks, external hard drives, sd cards etc..
That was the impression I was getting, hence my question. But since thumb drives typically come preformatted in either FAT32 or exFAT, I thought maybe there was a third possible use of the word "portable" that I am unfamiliar with.
External hard drives with larger capacities and potentially larger files might be a use case for NTFS. While it isn't fast, ntfs-3g has worked fine for basic use for me. Someone said in another comment that ntfs-3g is unmaintained, though, which was news to me, and obviously not a great thing if true.
I suppose exFAT might be a viable option for larger external drives as well due to its higher file size limit. None of the other commonly used file systems (including native Linux file systems) seemed easy to use from both Linux and Windows the last time I looked into it.
Honestly ntfs-3g is fine. It's slow, which I'd always blamed on NTFS since NTFS is also clearly slow for large directories of small files on Windows also, but apparently this new driver is better in that regard.
