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USB Flash Drive Comparison Part 2 — FAT32 Vs. NTFS
Dampeal writes "Ok, a little while back I ran a somewhat large USB Flash Drive Comparison with 21 drives compared, today I got part two of that comparison. I've taken the 8gig and 4 gig drives, nine in total, and formatted them FAT32, NTFS and ExFAT and ran all of the tests over again for a comparison of how the file systems work on the drives." Good news — after some exhaustively graphed testing scenarios, the author comes to a nice conclusion for lazy people, writing "[I]n my opinion the all around best choice is FAT32, or the default for most all USB drives out there today, it seems to give us the best average performance overall."
I'm lazy, so it's good to know that the default setting is the best.
For best results, avoid doing stupid things.
Since interoperability is key in this context, anything besides FAT32 is hopelessly esoteric. So why not test the OSS solution as well?
The question about filesystems has come up a few times over on the Dell Mini forums. Basically the question is which is better to use on machines with SSDs? If you're not dealing with >4GB files, several people have suggested that you're better off formatting the drive as FAT32. I'll need to take a better look at this article when I get a chance, but it seems to be suggesting the same thing.
This guy's the limit!
FAT32 is great, unless you want to exceed the 4gb filesize limit. In which case you will need an alternative.
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I thought NTFS had a patten on it which is why they used FAT32 instead.
If I format one of these with ReiserFS, am I still okay to take it through airport security?
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
Did he run tests with 16GB files?
I wish there were tests covering "typical user mishaps". Things like inopportune powerdowns and flash drive yanking. My anecdotal evidence is that I've never had issues with FAT32 but have had entire NTFS partitions become unreadable. It's just anecdote though. Now throw a truecrypt file into the mix ...
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Would one of the UFS variations be suitable for flash drives? And also better portability (almost all OS's support UFS by now). Would performance be better?
It seems like the write time is the most variable out of all these. FAT32/NTFS/ExFAT scores for reading are all within a few % of each other.
I wonder what makes NTFS so slow for writes? The journaling alone reduces it that far?
The question about filesystems has come up a few times over on the Dell Mini forums. Basically the question is which is better to use on machines with SSDs? If you're not dealing with >4GB files, several people have suggested that you're better off formatting the drive as FAT32. I'll need to take a better look at this article when I get a chance, but it seems to be suggesting the same thing.
FAT32 is fine for a USB stick, but you shouldn't install an OS on it. The problem is that FAT32 has no concept of file ownership. So your operating system will be unable to restrict access to files based on the user, which is one of the building blocks of security on any modern OS. This way, any (malicious) process running on the system can overwrite critical system files to do arbitrary damage.
Even if you run windows XP as adminstrator, not all processes on your system run as administrator so you will still be (slightly) decreasing security by having it on a FAT32 filesystem.
I'm currently on site at a customer's office. I have one of their PCs and one of ours; legal restrictions mean I can't copy our source onto their machines or their source onto ours.
The solution to this is to put a copy of our source onto a USB stick and plug it into their machine, and then use a NTFS junction point (aka a symlink) to let their Windows-based build system see our source. This works very nicely, and I can just unplug the USB stick whenever I leave and the lawyers are happy.
However:
- I have to use NTFS. This is because the two machines are set to use different time zones, and frickin' FAT stores timestamps in the local time, which means that if I were to touch a file on one machine and the move the USB stick, the build system will go horribly wrong.
- I have 'optimise for performance' turned on; the non-Windows world calls this write caching. This boosts performance on NTFS *hugely*. I see no mention of this in the review. I now have to remember to unmount the stick on the Windows machine before pulling it, but it's worth it.
- You have to use the command line format.exe to format a removable drive as NTFS, because frickin' Windows doesn't let you do it from the GUI.
- If you turn NTFS compression on, you get a tiny bit more speed boost. But while Linux will read compressed NTFS files, it won't write them.
- You need to do something obscure with NTFS file permissions if you're going to move the stick between two Windows machines, because otherwise you'll be creating files on one machine you won't be allowed to edit on the other. Linux, of course, just ignores NTFS ACLs.
I have investigated the Windows ext2 driver, but while it does work reasonably well, it's still pretty clunky, and ext2 isn't much better than NTFS. What I'd really like is a decent Windows JFS or XFS driver --- NTFS is *so* last century.
Since the article is /.ed and I can't RTFA anyway, a question: I'm about to have a user start backing her files up to a 32GB USB stick. Probably no huge movie files. Should I format the stick as NTFS or exFAT (she's running Vista SP1)?
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Except if you'd even bothered to read the summary, you'd notice he did consider ExFAT. Whoops.
What about ext2 and other filesystems then?
Ninety percent of desktop PCs run Windows, and for interchange among the public, file systems that most PCs running Windows cannot read aren't worth testing. If you format your USB drive as ext2 and carry it to someone else's PC, you'll need to 1. carry a CD or a second USB drive with the ext2 driver and 2. get admin rights in order to install it on someone else's PC. It'd be like the Windows 9x days, when you needed to carry a floppy disk with the USB mass storage class driver whenever you used someone else's computer.
So you could just have a small partition holding the ext2 driver. Not really worth the effort for that, but it makes sense for things like truecrypt.
This can also be used on XP - the drivers from Vista install on it just fine.
Select the usb drive right click/hardware/policies select optimize for performance and the GUI formatter will now have NTFS as an option.
After formatting you can reset the policy as needed.
I personally turn optimize for performance off on USB drives as many times explorer or some other program will lock the drive preventing a safe removal.
I've always been under the impression that NTFS is inherently slower (though I do not know exactly "how much") because of the processing of ACLs/Audit events that do not take place under FAT32, and that other than for these "features" NTFS and FAT32 are very similar.
Forgive my spelling from time to time. I'm often posting during short breaks.
I don't care for compatibility with Windows. I use exclusively free *nixes and so does all my friends (otherwise they wouldn't be real friends, would they?). So having this richer buffet of file systems than just the two in the article, what should I choose? I have heard someone say that ext2 means less wear on the drive than ext3 (something with journaling?).
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There's one other reason to choose NTFS: the file system is spread across the drive, versus having a localized FAT table. Unless the wear-leveling on the drive is good (and most controllers for USB sticks are more than sufficient for what they're designed for, but I wouldn't call "good," they're designed for price), you end up with very uneven wear on a finite-life product. Add in that the USB market takes the lowest grade of memory available, and I'd trust NTFS over FAT, generally.
That said, I still use FAT, because as long as my thumb drive works long enough to move my presentation from my laptop to my customer's, it's done its job. I don't expect it to have a long life, and I have an unlimited stream of new drives to play with.
Yay, we have an answer to which of these two obsolete legacy fs works best with this modern hardware. But you left out Amiga FFS and MacOS HFS.
Funny there's no mention of ext4 and reiser3 and xfs.
Since many folks use their usb devices as backup media, it should be noted since fat32 has a file size limitation of about 4gb, fat32 is not an option if you wish to use MS Backup utility to create backup images larger than that.
(1) Does it have a cap I am likely to lose?
(2) Can I attach it to my keyring? (no silly lanyard clips please)
Both far more important to me in daily use than a 20% speed difference between one drive and another.
It's not like I'm running terabyte database sorts on these little guys.......
I'm sure i cant be the only person who noticed this, but in many of the graphs TWO of the bars were coloured white with the other being red/green or whatever, not just that but they colouring seemed to be switched at random.
That's a huge usability failure!
This may sound off-topic, but has anyone tested ext4's performance on USB drives? I hope ext4's delayed allocation (well, something not specific to ext4) could provide some meaningful enhancement for USB usage. I'm considering the idea of ext4 on a flash drive with no journaling and noatime for LiveUSB. That being said, I'll have to make sure it works with GRUB..
Also the new BtrFS is said to be optimized for SSDs. I wonder whether this will benefit USB flash drives too when it comes out.
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Why not VFAT? Or are these only windows formated filesystem types?
NTFS' design dictates many more accesses than FAT. Yet another advantage of FAT32 if you care about longevity at all.
First: The drives are likely optimized for FAT32. I would not be surprised if they contained very specific optimizations based on knowledge of the internal FAT datastructures.
Second: JFFS2 requires that you actually be able to access the flash device, not some mass storage layer on top of it. And isn't there something newer anyway?
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The biggest difficulty with FAT is the loss of file permissions. 95% of my use of USB drives, is for a quick backup of the day's work, and for moving things around between laptop, desktop, and work machines. I've given up playing tar games, and now just format it ext2. It works transparently on the various linuxies and life is so much simpler.
How do you keep user names/numbers synchronized across different Linux installations well enough for this to work?
Different grades of flash memory are available, visible to the consumer as the "Class" rating on SDHC cards (SD above 2 GB capacity). You can buy unrated, Class 2, 4, 6 and sometimes 8 MB/s nominal serial block write speed. These rating are very important for digital camera performance.
Did you try any of the Classed SD cards in a fast USB adapter (not all are fast) to establish some watermarks for what class flash chips the labels are hiding?
FAT32 has always been 2-5x faster than NTFS....its just that FAT32 limited you to 4GB file sizes...
NTFS would put premature wear on a memory disk since it would uselessly keep a transaction log for file I/O's.
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