Problem running on large Pendrive, system is too slow

[daniel]

Hi, my first post here... yeah, newbie

Burned ISO to a CD and install to a USB drive.
So... I have a Pendrive, HP v165w (32GB) and can't install Porteus properly. Actually It runs, but its fast or slow according to size partitions or mount point (?).

Experiences I tested, distributing 30GB in different ways (always with 1st partition FAT32, 2nd parition EXT2, and 3rd with 2GB Swap):

1) System extremely slow... I mean veeery very very slow! Open file manager takes several seconds... almost 30s!
- FAT32 25GB
- EXT2 5GB

2) System still slow, but things get better (little bit slow than LiveCD)
- FAT32 15GB
- EXT2 15GB

3) Running nice and easy... pretty fast (looks like running from a hard drive!)
- FAT32 8GB
- EXT2 22GB



When I was tired to play with partitions , I did one last test, with an old Kingston Datatraveler (8GB):

- FAT32 5GB
- EXT2 3GB
- No Swap

The result was very similar to the last above, Porteus runs like a bullet!

As I need a large FAT32 space, just formatted all drive and now I'm running with save file .dat

Is this normal?
Is there a relation between speed and partition size, or partition mount point?

[fanthom]

hi daniel,

for the clarity: i understand that you are saving changes on the ext2 partition and it's making porteus slower depending on the size of this partition. is that correct? or you mean that size of the FAT partition matters as well?

can anybody confirm this?

thanks

[daniel]

Yes, saving changes on the EXT2 partition, normal. Using FAT32 just for transfer files (videos, doc, images, etc) to different PCs.

I don't know if the size of any partition matters, the EXT2 mount point seems more important... closer as possible to the beginning of unit is better (?).

[JosepZ]

The only time my system ran really slow was when I formatted the drive as ext2. I know it is theoretically better because of ext2's lack of journaling, which means less wear on the USB device, and that's why I decided to give it a try. Bad, bad idea. Not only it ran slower; I also got a corrupted system in a relatively short time. FSCK didn't fix it. Then I reformatted, re-installed... and it happened again. And a 3rd time with a different pendrive (at first I thought it was a hardware problem).

I'll stick to ext4. I was going to try xfs, as it seems there's a resurgence going on that presents it as a better fs than ext4, but some say that advantage doesn't apply to solid state drives. Ext4 is great for me and I'm very happy with its performance.

I also use a 1st FAT32 partition for file transfer (1GB out of an 8GB drive is enough for me), but if you are going to run Porteus in a Windows filesystem maybe you could use NTFS. With FAT32 you're limited to a 4GB max save.dat file. Any Windows system will open it and write on it just as well as with FAT.