What Best File Sysytem Use On USB, HDD(SOLVED)

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What Best File Sysytem Use On USB, HDD(SOLVED)

Post#1 by fi5ban » 05 Nov 2013, 16:46

I am wonder what would be the best file system to use on
USB Thumb Drive--USB Disk Drive--Internal Hard Disk Drive??

Ext2, Ext3,Ext4,............

Thanks
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Last edited by fi5ban on 07 Nov 2013, 16:14, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: What Best File Sysytem Use On USB, HDD

Post#2 by donald » 05 Nov 2013, 20:40

Hi fi5ban

The difference is
ext3/4 are journaling filesystems (more safety), ext2 is not.
what is journaling?..look here:
Journaling file system
also they are a little different in speed, but in your daily work
you won't notice that.
I haven't had any trouble with any of them.
(for USB Thumb Drives i'm still using ext2)

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Re: What Best File Sysytem Use On USB, HDD

Post#3 by fanthom » 05 Nov 2013, 21:30

f2fs is designed for flash/SSD and looks promising:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=a ... 9_fs&num=1
however - this is young filesystem and Porteus does not support booting from it yet.
Please add [Solved] to your thread title if the solution was found.

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Re: What Best File Sysytem Use On USB, HDD

Post#4 by Ahau » 05 Nov 2013, 23:13

I personally prefer to use ext4 on my usb flash drives, along with a FAT partition to allow file sharing with other OS's. I'd probably use the same for hard drives, but I do most of my linux work on flash, and that's what my comments here are directed towards. In my opinion, ext4 is faster than ext2 and since the default behaviour is to only journal metadata (rather than mirroring all data), you don't lose vast amounts of space to the journal but you have a little insurance in case of filesystem corruption (not that I've ever experienced a problem with ext2!). Another concern would be read/write cycles, as journaling will cause more wear on your drive. I'm not overly worried about that for three reasons: first, most modern drives can handle lots and lots of read/write cycles - I'm more likely to lose a drive than wear it out; second, I don't usually save changes so I mostly read data and don't save to the drive other than when I'm purposefully saving my work; third, flash media is getting cheaper and cheaper so if a drive wears out I can easily replace it--in fact, I'll probably always buy a new drive to increase storage capacity before I ever wear one out -- my 16gb drive is chock full ATM, just like my 8gb was before I got that, and my 4gb before the 8gb!.

You'll likely get different answers from every person who responds to you on this one :) Some people love NTFS, some love XFS, some ext2, etc. If they were further along in development, I'd probably be using btrfs (fastest one I've tested but didn't have reliable repair tools last time I played with it), nilfs2 (crazy fun restore points but also not a good set of tools) or f2fs. Lots of people probably never change from FAT and that's just fine, too. Try a few out and see what you think.
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Re: What Best File Sysytem Use On USB, HDD

Post#5 by brokenman » 06 Nov 2013, 22:31

You'll likely get different answers from every person who responds to you on this one
While this may be true for the majority of people, please remember that Ahau actually went the extra mile, tested and recorded performance data for many of the file systems. My money goes on his opinion when it comes to file system choice.
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Re: What Best File Sysytem Use On USB, HDD(SOLVED)

Post#6 by fi5ban » 07 Nov 2013, 16:11

So it was said so it will be done :D

I bought a 32g SanDisk Extreme USB 3.0 (cost + performance=best value) and partitioned out Ext4 and Fat32 :Yahoo!:

Thanks everyone for your advise!! Just one more thing to love about Porteus

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Re: What Best File Sysytem Use On USB, HDD(SOLVED)

Post#7 by tome » 06 Mar 2014, 18:14

I formatted my hd partition to ext4 - GParted shows that size is ca 20GB and used is ca 500MB. I have tried

Code: Select all

tune2fs -m 1.0 /dev/sda1
but still GParted shows 500MB for "Used".

1. For what is used this 2,5% (0,5/20)?
I have also bug for ext4 now:
"Creating live filesystem and inserting modules" takes ca 15 seconds (probably every boot more), so I copied porteus folder to another folder and changed "from=" to boot from this newer folder and now it works correctly - (2) how can I try repair this ext4 partition? "fsck" during boot doesn't help.
3. Which unix filesystem is the nearest fat or ntfs? Is it ext2 or xfs without journaling?

I was able to destroy my .dat containers (ext4) - for first I can not delete one folder in it, second can not be unmounted.
Can someone try repair them https://www.dropbox.com/sh/i8toxmd0lrsycvb/teGTil4hlk and devote his time to science? :)
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Re: What Best File Sysytem Use On USB, HDD(SOLVED)

Post#8 by fanthom » 06 Mar 2014, 21:37

For what is used this 2,5% (0,5/20)?
arch wiki:

Code: Select all

By default 5% of a filesystem will be flagged as reserved for root user to avoid fragmentation.
how can I try repair this ext4 partition? "fsck" during boot doesn't help.
boot with copy2ram and nohd then experiment with fsck as explained here:
http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2012/08/fsc ... -examples/

Which unix filesystem is the nearest fat or ntfs? Is it ext2 or xfs without journaling?
ext2 is without journaling, xfs has it

btw: i was able to repair/unmount your containers without problems :)
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Re: What Best File Sysytem Use On USB, HDD(SOLVED)

Post#9 by tome » 07 Mar 2014, 18:34

By default 5% of a filesystem will be flagged as reserved for root user to avoid fragmentation.
- changed with

Code: Select all

tune2fs -m 1.0 /dev/sda1
to 1% but GParted shows still ca 500MB.

EDIT:
Founded bug - I use "/mnt/live/porteus/optional/persistent_changes" for my changes (saved only some data through relative symlinks) - More data = more time for "Creating live filesystem and inserting modules". Any idea how to solve this?
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