I have been using exfat since it has support for big ISOs and is compatible with Linux.
The ST400 does NOT support ext4, but I didn’t care much: I wanted a partition scheme that was accessible from both Windows and Linux.
I don’t recall ever having to change the firmware for that, nor for NTFS which I have used the very first time when testing it out.
For my use case, I am using a cheap 120G ssd on which I only keep ISOs, so I never found myself needing multiple partitions…
Edit: The documentation does say that it supports multiple partitions, but again, I never tested that out, so YMMV…
Hope this helps.
IMO, ASRock.
Considering that they’re probably the only mobo manufacturer that officially supports using consumer AM4 CPUs on a server (see ASRock Rack), and always supported ECC ram on all AM4 motherboards - and that I haven’t had anything negative happen with any of their products so far (at work) - I personally would choose ASRock next.
Haven’t had the chance to try them for AM5 yet, sadly.