Tiny Core Linux

General TC => General TC Talk => Topic started by: linus72 on June 08, 2009, 06:30:40 PM

Title: ext2 vs ext3 on usb-is ext2 better for health of usb?
Post by: linus72 on June 08, 2009, 06:30:40 PM

OK, which is beter?
i have heard ext3 does alot of read/writes back to usb 'cause of journaling.
is this true?
Is ext2 better for health of USB.
Note, I am writing this from newly ext2 formatted usb(was ext3), booting tinycore_2.0 with
microcore elements.
It runs great, Tinycore rocks.
I am redoing my whole tinycore section and so this will be good info for the how-to also.
thanks ;D

Title: Re: ext2 vs ext3 on usb-is ext2 better for health of usb?
Post by: softwaregurl on June 09, 2009, 01:10:03 AM

I was just reading Wikipedia articles on ext2 and ext3 and journaling a few days ago. 
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext2 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext2)

Quote

ext2 is still recommended over journaling file systems on bootable USB flash drives and other solid-state drives. ext2 performs fewer writes than ext3 since it does not need to write to the journal. As the major aging factor of a flash chip is the number of erase cycles, and as those happen frequently on writes, this increases the life span of the solid-state device.[1] Another good practice for filesystems on flash devices is the use of the noatime mount option, for the same reason.

the ext3 page is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext3 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext3)
I was actually looking for file size limits.

Title: Re: ext2 vs ext3 on usb-is ext2 better for health of usb?
Post by: curaga on June 09, 2009, 06:52:03 AM

ext2 limits:

Quote

Filesystem block size:     1kB        2kB        4kB        8kB

File size limit:          16GB      256GB     2048GB     2048GB
Filesystem size limit:  2047GB     8192GB    16384GB    32768GB

From kernel documentation

Title: Re: ext2 vs ext3 on usb-is ext2 better for health of usb?
Post by: linus72 on June 09, 2009, 09:04:49 AM

OK, having checked it out I believe I am going to go with ext2, as it damages usb less and the data is not that important that I need a journaling fs.
Block size shouldn't be an issue on 2GB and 4GB usb either right?
thanks.
Nice to meet you software gurl-Please don't be offended by my eager use of the female figure in some of my screenshots/downloads/wallpapers. ::)

Title: Re: ext2 vs ext3 on usb-is ext2 better for health of usb?
Post by: bmarkus on June 09, 2009, 09:19:15 AM

Hi,

Todays flash drives have much longer lifetime than in the past so I think it is not a real argument.

Please consider that TC is running in RAM and do not require flash drive to run, only for initial load and backup.

It is whorth to use a journaling ext3 to have safety against file system corruption.

Regards

Béla

Title: Re: ext2 vs ext3 on usb-is ext2 better for health of usb?
Post by: jpeters on June 09, 2009, 02:01:38 PM

....have to agree on the corruption issue.  I recently moved my backup to an ext3 partition, after noticing
substancial corruption even with frequent e2fsck fixes...generally ionode issues.     

Title: Re: ext2 vs ext3 on usb-is ext2 better for health of usb?
Post by: bmarkus on June 09, 2009, 02:10:30 PM

Yeah, and a 1-2 GByte stick what is enough for such work is cheap. Much cheaper than your extra time spent to recover lost data  ;)

Title: Re: ext2 vs ext3 on usb-is ext2 better for health of usb?
Post by: jpeters on June 09, 2009, 03:35:12 PM

..and also much faster boot time by not having to include 'checkfs' in bootoptions (..although rarely mentioned in our "instant on, no-rot" aspirations).