By default a USB stick is formatted as FAT
I find them prone to errors and frequently need to be re-fomatted or even more severe, a new partition table and re-partitioned.
I don’t use windows.
Is there any benefit in using a Linux formatting scheme such as ext 2 or other?
The main benefit I can think of is that flash drives formatted as FAT won’t preserve file permissions on files copied from Linux. But I tend to keep my flash drives formatted as FAT because I sometimes need to view them in Windows.
On 10/26/2012 07:16 AM, caf4926 wrote:
>
> By default a USB stick is formatted as FAT
>
> I find them prone to errors and frequently need to be re-fomatted or
> even more severe, a new partition table and re-partitioned.
>
> I don’t use windows.
>
> Is there any benefit in using a Linux formatting scheme such as ext 2
> or other?
Of course. Putting any Linux file system on the device gets you the same
advantages on a solid-state unit as you find on traditional rotating media. As I
need to use my sticks to transfer files to/from my wife’s Windows computer, I
always reformat my sticks to NTFS, but I wish I could use ext4. That said, why
are you getting so many errors? Are your sticks worn out? The early ones had
limited lifetime, or are you not properly closing them. The only times I have
needed to repartition one is after it has been used with imagewriter.
I would not recommend ext2 - you should use a journaled fs such as ext3 or ext4.
On 2012-10-26 14:16, caf4926 wrote:
>
> By default a USB stick is formatted as FAT
>
> I find them prone to errors and frequently need to be re-fomatted or
> even more severe, a new partition table and re-partitioned.
I don’t have those problems. Ever. 
Either you use them a lot or there is a problem with your procedure (or the desktop).
For instance, I don’t work ON them. I work on the hard disk, then copy the files to it.
> I don’t use windows.
Lucky you.
> Is there any benefit in using a Linux formatting scheme such as ext 2
> or other?
If you don’t have to share files with anybody using Windows, yes, you should format your sticks with
ext2 - or ext4 with no journal (for the extents). The only advantage I see is Linux permissions. For
recovery speed, better use reiserfs or xfs.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4 x86_64 “Celadon” (Minas Tirith))
I have USB sticks with both types of formatting. When carying data between Linux systems I use ext. formatted ones. When exchanging with my TV and other devices, including the occasionaly Windows system, I use a Windows one of course.
BTW, now that I am thinking about it. My TV manual says that it has Linux on it. I could try an ext2 on it.
On 2012-10-26 14:46, Larry Finger wrote:
> I would not recommend ext2 - you should use a journaled fs such as ext3 or ext4.
No, absolutely not.
USB stick have limited write cycles. It is a large number, but there is a limit. Using a journal
multiplies the amount of writes on the same region a lot, so don’t use them if you value long life.
In theory, modern sticks spread the writes randomly over the available sectors, but that remains to
be proved (in Linux, not fat nor ntfs). It may increase life, but not eternally.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4 x86_64 “Celadon” (Minas Tirith))
I had flash drives I used for installing oses (constant dd on it) wear out eventually. I would for sure use ext4 but disable the journal on it. I think there is also a way to give it permissions for normal users but I never tried that specifically.
If you ever even might need to use it on windows, it would be worth just using fat32 I think.
Thank you for all the advices. Much appreciated.
I’ll do some experimenting and see.
i would go with Fat bescause it will work on both operating systems
Both?
See OP
I had an interesting situation with my sd card. I was no longer going to use it for my camera. so I decided to dump some important stuff to it. It would become “yet another backup”. Of course it is not the primary backup.
The interesting part is the stuff I wanted to backup was already on it, so I copied the data off, and formatted to a more advanced Linux filesystem (ext4). I had out of space errors when I copied the files back on. Even with less space ‘reserved for root’ it still needed about 100mb.
So I tried btrfs next and it required even more (800mb) even if I tried compression.
So getting a bit fed up I lastly tried xfs which formatted and copied the data just fine. I think for me instead of btrfs I am going to move my systems to xfs. I installed my main openSUSE 12.2 with xfs/lvm and performance is great. My boot time is down from 25s to 20s as reported by systemd-analyze.
On 2013-02-06 17:16, nightwishfan wrote:
> So getting a bit fed up I lastly tried xfs which formatted and copied
> the data just fine. I think for me instead of btrfs I am going to move
> my systems to xfs.
Yes, I know, I use XFS on my backup media because it uses less space for
its own structures. I even use XFS on DVDs.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 12.1 x86_64 “Asparagus” at Telcontar)
On 02/06/2013 06:48 PM, Carlos E. R. wrote:
> On 2013-02-06 17:16, nightwishfan wrote:
>> So getting a bit fed up I lastly tried xfs which formatted and copied
>> the data just fine. I think for me instead of btrfs I am going to move
>> my systems to xfs.
>
> Yes, I know, I use XFS on my backup media because it uses less space for
> its own structures. I even use XFS on DVDs.
I have my video recordings from Mythtv on an xfs volume as it can delete large
files much quicker than extX; however, it can be really lousy with smallish
files. I have the kernel source trees for a couple of machines on that disk, and
there are times at which the build hangs while the disk drive is very busy.
There are no errors - just something in the xfs overhead.
On 2013-02-07 04:48, Larry Finger wrote:
> I have my video recordings from Mythtv on an xfs volume as it can delete
> large files much quicker than extX; however, it can be really lousy with
> smallish files. I have the kernel source trees for a couple of machines
> on that disk, and there are times at which the build hangs while the
> disk drive is very busy. There are no errors - just something in the xfs
> overhead.
Heh, for kernel builds use reiserfs instead. The speed difference is
measurable.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 12.1 x86_64 “Asparagus” at Telcontar)