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What filesystem for large thumbdrive



On 8/22/2010 2:47 AM, David Kramer wrote:
> I would like to use a thumbdrive for offsite backup so I picked up at
> 16G thumbdrive (the backup file for my server is about 12G).  In other
> words, my use case is a very few but very large files.
> 
> I formatted it with ext3 with 2K block size (so I can put larger files
> on it), and am finding it VERY slow.  I'm trying to copy the backup file
> to it, and 45 minutes later only 1.5G of the file was copied so far.
> 
> This wasn't supposed to be a very slow thumbdrive (Kingston DataTraveler
> I - 16 GB USB 2.0 Flash Drive DTI/16GB), so I'm wondering if I should
> have picked a different filesystem.  I guess I don't really care about
> journaling since I'm putting on copies of files, and doing it maybe
> every few weeks.  Maybe I should try ext2?
> 
> This is Ubuntu upgraded to 10.4 mere hours ago, BTW.

Sometimes machines have some usb ports that are still v1.x (and very
slow for file transfers), and others that are v2.

But the syncing from a journaled filesystem really kills performance on
USB drives. Ext2 would be a better choice:
http://blogs.koolwal.net/2009/01/29/installing-linux-on-usb-part-3-which-linux-filesystem-for-usb-devices/

(note that relatime is already the default for modern 2.6 kernels)

HTH,
Matt






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