I tend to use journaled filesystems on my usb/flash/mmc drives and sticks these days like EXT4 or even ReiserFS.
Blasphemy? My reasoning is that drives are much higher quality these days, and in some cases I'll even put drives designed for say continous video/body-cam duty to use for booting and storage.
The other reason is that my data is more important than trying to prolong the life of some weedy 2gb drive you found in your dad's digital camera or laying around in a parking lot (DONT boot those!!)
I also took a hint from Prof Knopper who witnessed students just yanking drives out of boxes - even if they did so right after hitting shutdown button, but not letting the system totally halt. I know Knopper prefers ReiserFS for "self healing" properties, but I'm not about to start a FS flamewar about it.
So, human error, power outage, cat pulls out your plug - that kind of thing - makes me not want to use non-journalled EXT2 these days with quality drives.
But that's just me - run what you like for a fs...
I don't use EXT2 on sticks
I don't use EXT2 on sticks
That's a UNIX book - cool. -Garth