Porteus

Hello everyone, currently I have only one USB with 3.5GB pictures and 1.5GB free space. I have no hard drives nor OS, just the Porteus Live CD and the USB. So - will my pictures get deleted if I install Porteus on the USB as a bootloader? The USB type is FAT and the Porteus version is Xfce 32-bit if it matters.

No, your pictures will be safe, relax. I also use my USB stick with Porteus and a lot of personal files

Maybe you should format in NTFS, as it can handle 4gb+ files. Also, it supports symlinks, which FAT doesn't.

An install updates the MBR so if your pictures are important I would make sure you have them backed up somewhere, just in case. I've installed Porteus to 2 USB drives and honestly don't remember if it did a format or not. Both drives are FAT32 and it serves me fine. If you have a need for files larger than 4GB I would recommend a format of exFAT. I would not recommend NTFS which is a journeling format and it's overhead slows down the drive's access times. Not sure if exFAT supports symlinks I've never used them.

Alright, thanks for the info guys!

Ed_P, do you have any benchmark supporting that NTFS is indeed slower than FAT or exFAT, specially during an USB stick boot? I found this:



'According to the average benchmark results, which shows a normalized average performance for all types of benchmarks for each file system relative to the FAT32 file system performance, the NTFS file system delivers up to 19% of performance improvements and the exFAT file system delivers up to 7% of performance improvements over the normally used FAT32 file system.' source: http://www.flexense.com/fat32_exfat_ntf ... rison.html

BTW, I think exFAT has a little problem of compatibility: it doesn't work on Windows XP out of the box; only if you install an update. There are also some problems with old consoles, like Xbox 360 and Playstation 3.

fulalas wrote:Ed_P, do you have any benchmark supporting that NTFS is indeed slower than FAT ou exFAT, specially during a USB stick boot?

Can't say that I do, and whatever I would find would be for the USB drives way before USB 3.0. In the early days it was the journeling that was the problem.