Choosing a Formatting Option for the Flash Drive

[SageBrush]

Decisions, decisions ...

My house is a mixture of Mac OS and Chrome computers, and I'd like some advice which format to choose for a 1 TB NVME external flash drive I'm getting ready to buy for the Tesla Cam recordings.

I'm not a fan of any of the Microsoft formats if I have a good alternative.
I'd most like to format as ext4 since I think Mac OS 10.15 will play nicely. What is the state of Tesla wrt to ext4 ? Happy ? Overjoyed ? Grudging and buggy ?

 

[Wennfred]

I don’t do Windows, switched to Apple many years ago. But seems that the Tesla DashCam/sentry mode system prefers the older style of Fat32, I know because I had issues after a few updates. Someone here posted this site for the Fat32 and it has worked great for me. Maybe give it a try first and avoid the headaches.

Don’t give it a volume name, leave that blank and you can use the quick format.

Ridgecrop Consultants Ltd

Fred

 

[boaterva]

I thought the car would/could format it now? Is there a limit on the size drive it can handle? I was wondering about this when this feature was announced but never saw an answer.

 

[Wennfred]

I thought the car would/could format it now? Is there a limit on the size drive it can handle? I was wondering about this when this feature was announced but never saw an answer.

The screen format mode didn’t work well with my flash cards or SSD drive and when it took it was very buggy. As far as limit, I use a 500gb SSD in one car and a 256gb in the other.

Fred

 

[TomT]

FAT32

 

[Gasaraki]

Decisions, decisions ...

My house is a mixture of Mac OS and Chrome computers, and I'd like some advice which format to choose for a 1 TB NVME external flash drive I'm getting ready to buy for the Tesla Cam recordings.

I'm not a fan of any of the Microsoft formats if I have a good alternative.
I'd most like to format as ext4 since I think Mac OS 10.15 will play nicely. What is the state of Tesla wrt to ext4 ? Happy ? Overjoyed ? Grudging and buggy ?

LOL. Short answer is... use the car to format.

Long answer is that the car can only read FAT32 and exFAT. So... sorry that you don't like Microsoft. The car will format to exFAT. My 512GB SSD works fine in my car.

 

[jjrandorin]

Havent tried ext4, but as @Gasaraki mentions, the car now formats the drive as ext4 if formatted in the car. The car previously wanted Fat32, but not seems to prefer exfat, so as mentioned that is what I would go with.

No idea if ext4 will work, but not having the format be in the one the car wants has caused issues in the past, with dashcam disappearing, or recordings not happening etc, for many people reported here.

TL ; DR +1 on the "use exFat" suggestion, and keep in mind that the USB ports in the car are USB 2 (when you are choosing fast storage options).

 

[Mattopotamus]

I thought the car would/could format it now? Is there a limit on the size drive it can handle? I was wondering about this when this feature was announced but never saw an answer.

This. Try the car first. It will format for you now. I did that without issue.

 

[TX_M3P+]

I use the in-car format option to wipe out the saved sentry mode captures and reset the drive back to fresh starting point. No issues so far.

 

[SageBrush]

Havent tried ext4, but as @Gasaraki mentions, the car now formats the drive as ext4 if formatted in the car. The car previously wanted Fat32, but not seems to prefer exfat, so as mentioned that is what I would go with.

err ... what ?

 

[jjrandorin]

err ... what ?

sorry.. was typing this morning before drinking coffee. "but not" should be "but now"

 

[SageBrush]

sorry.. was typing this morning before drinking coffee. "but not" should be "but now"

My confusion is reading

"but as @Gasaraki mentions, the car now formats the drive as ext4 if formatted in the car"

Gasaraki said the car formats the drive as ExFAT

 

[Occar]

For a few updates, the dash cam would happily use ext4 which was a far better choice in this application due to being journaled, but sadly, they've since disabled that functionality (unless at some point they re-enabled it...). It stopped accepting ext4 as a valid dashcam formatting right when the in car viewer was added. Initially, it would read ext4, but refuse to write once they did this (you could play your existing files, but it wouldn't turn on dash cam to write more). One patch later it stopped even reading ext4. I stopped testing after that.

 

[jjrandorin]

My confusion is reading

"but as @Gasaraki mentions, the car now formats the drive as ext4 if formatted in the car"

Gasaraki said the car formats the drive as ExFAT

Yeah, I blame lack of coffee again.. it formats it in the car as exFat, not ext4.