As some of you may or may not know, I’m in the process of building a nice little home server with my Raspberry Pi. And before you say it: yes, I could just use a NAS but I don’t want to. I want to have my own server.
Anyway, after getting many many many (many!) corrupted drives and blaming it on formatting the drives with HFS+ I tried to format it with EXT4 and thought then Linux can deal with it better.
But then I realized that it was something different altogether: I wasn’t shutting down the system the right way and even though I searched time and again for answers, everybody failed to mention the most important option to set when shutting down a system. So here I’m writing it in the hope of other people finding this answer:
To shutdown your pi and safely remove your drives type this into your console:
sudo shutdown -hP now
This will completely switch off your Raspberry Pi and you can then see it, because all the LED indicators for the network will go off too and only the red power LED will stay on. Then it’s safe to remove the drive even in HFSplus format. At the next boot the drive will not mount as read-only. Yay.