I’m afraid this post will be very vague, but I still wanted to share it here in case anybody has experienced something similar. (In case it might matter I’m using Plasma 5.5.x from the KDE repository, not the version bundled with the leap 42.1 image.)
A while ago I started noticing strange performance behavior with NTFS formatted USB drives that I have note seen like this before in some years of actively using Ubuntu and OpenSuse. Browsing a drive in dolphin with many folders/files started being very slow. (At first I even suspected a broken drive and replaced it with a new one). Allocating large files (e.g. when using ktorrent) takes a lot of time. Copying a large file (ca. 7 GiB) to a usb pen drive failed repeatedly by just silently aborting after a long time. I did not even notice it before trying to read from another computer where the file was either not present at all or incomplete.
Now I don’t have any numbers to go by, it’s just that some activities that I do more or less regularly feel noticeably slower all of a sudden. I did some research and read about ntfs-3g beging implemented in user land and so on, but again, I have a no memory of such problems in the past few years.
So, with that out of the way, do you have any idea what could cause such behavior? Is it at all plausible, that the plasma desktop is related?
I was probably running opensuse 11.4 at that time. I downloaded a DVD iso, using the metalink. I was downloading to an external drive formatted with NTFS. The pre-allocation of space was slow. The actual download speed was okay, limited by my ISP connection rather than by NTFS performance. But there was obviously more cpu overhead than with other file systems.
This is before Plasma 5 existed, so it could not have been a plasma 5 issue. I don’t think any of the software being used depended on a desktop.
As far as I know, the issue is that a lot of the NTFS support is at the user level, rather than in the kernel. That’s probably because NTFS is not an open file system. The linux tools result from reverse-engineering, and that reverse-engineering is probably incomplete and partly dependent on guess work.
Since then, I created a “ext4” file system which I use for iso downloads. It is a lot more efficient.
I only had performance problems. I have not seen reliability problems. I would guess that those are specific to the device that you are using or computer’s USB hardware.
Yes, I understand that NTFS performance on linux is sub-optimal for various reasons. But still I never “felt” it as much until very recently, which puzzles me. The worst thing is of course the copy jobs just silently failing. I’m reluctant to blame hardware, because writing from a windows system and reading on the opensuse system worked as expected.
Is this a USB stick? If so could be old and or near full the way flash works it may require forcing actual eraser on reallocated blocks to get blocks it can use. this can be slow on sticks
I have an old dual boot machine where I use an NTFS formatted 64GB USB stick for copying old videotapes to MPEG format in Windows and then manipulate them in Linux (because the machine only has a 40GB hard drive). So far I have had no problems with this dual use. But I have found that USB sticks in general are very variable in their performance regardless of format.
Personally I don’t have any issues really.
Most problems come from when I use the said stick in Windows and later come back to openSUSE with it, but that is so infrequent to even recall the problems I have had.
I can confirm though that a portable USB HDD formatted to ntfs performs much better, obviously.
Most of us probably only use ntfs for the sake of compatibility with others who may use Windows
As mentioned ext4 is an option but you’ll need to setup write permissions with that.