What filesystem for large thumbdrive

[David Kramer]

On 08/22/2010 07:33 AM, Matthew Gillen wrote:
> 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)

I reformatted the thumb drive with ext2.  I started copying my backup
file onto it at about 10:00pm, and at 12:20 it had copied only 7GB of
the file in the two hours.  Maybe this thumb drive really is that slow.
 I would think the 2K block size would make it even faster.


Maybe I need to give up on this idea, or assume I'll have to copy the
file on overnight or something.