EXT2 EXT3 EXT4 or NTFS for USB Stick/Disk?

[bozolino]

hello everybody,

can users here please comment on the theory and/or real world experience about the fastest and/or the most robust file system to use for a usb 3 stick attached to a asus-wrt-merlin router with usb 3? the purpose for the stick in my case is to provide large movie files for playback from a 68U router via smb on a mac (hence: big files, burst access, no unix system files).

i'm aware that this subject has been commented on repeatedly on various places inside and outside this forum, but i thought it would be nice to create an up-to-date forum post aggregating your expertise on the subject. thanks!

 

[ColinTaylor]

Personally I use FAT32

I use it for the following reasons:
1) It's the fastest of all the file systems (because it's so simple), particularly on writes. Which is important with slow flash drives.
2) I don't have any individual files > 4GB.
3) FAT32 is universal. If necessary I can plug it into a PC (any OS), PlayStation, DVD Player, anything.
4) There is nothing irreplaceable on the drive, so if it gets corrupted (because FAT32 isn't a journaling file system) I don't care. Just reformat and start again.

Obviously my use case is not the same as everyone else. Particularly point 4).

 

[pete y testing]

the purpose for the stick in my case is to provide large movie files for playback from a 68U router via smb on a mac (hence: big files, burst access, no unix system files).

then dont use the usb as its just going to tax your cpu cycles if you going to be doing it often and get your self a NAS , wack the hdd in it and bobs your uncle , its will do it all and far more and if you get the right ones time machine backups etc

 

[bozolino]

@ Colin Taylor: thanks! but is FAT really faster on a *nix router than ext2,3,4?
@ pete y testing: my main movie library is on a 12-bay nas with 24TB storage but i can't keep that online 24/7 because of the power costs. i want to move the most current content over to the router which has a much smaller power footprint.

 

[ColinTaylor]

@ Colin Taylor: thanks! but is FAT really faster on a *nix router than ext2,3,4?

Well I don't think the OS has any impact, not unless they really messed up the driver! But, as they say, YMMV.

When I did my testing I only had a few USB 2 flash drives to hand, not USB 3. The bottleneck was easily the read/write speed of the flash memory, not how efficiently the driver was written (the speeds were the same as when I plugged them into my Windows PC).

So reducing the number of I/O's to the flash drive can have a significant effect on performance. That is why ext3/ext4 is a poor choice unless you need the additional protection a journaling file system offers.

That said, there was quite a bit of variation between different devices. Also, the variation in read speeds was much less pronounced than write speeds, as one would expect.

None of this means anything really as you will have to do your own tests with your own devices and decide what works best for you.

UPDATE: RMerlin said this a couple of years ago: http://www.snbforums.com/threads/usb-file-system.15134/#post-102395
Personally, I wouldn't even consider NTFS or HFS+ unless I really had a good reason to.

 

[FTC]

Well, I am using a 3TB 2.5" usb3 disk as a 'family NAS' quite successfully w/my RT-AC3200 and using samba shares. It is formatted NTFS (I like being able to just disconnect it and be able to bring it with me ocassionally), and I can obtain sustained transfer rates to/from it of around 60MB/sec, so quite good, however I am still tuning this for performance.

 

[ColinTaylor]

Bear in mind that there is a huge difference in speed between a flash drive and a hard drive. With a hard drive attached to the router the bottleneck moves from being the device itself, to being predominantly the speed at which Samba can send and receive data. This in turn tends to be heavily dependent on the routers CPU and the amount of free RAM rather than the type of file system being used.

I suppose another way of looking at it is; Do you really care how fast it is? Provided it can stream your videos at what, <3MB/s for HD. Loading the videos onto the drive tends to be a one-off process, so do you care if it takes 30 seconds or 40? Looking at it this way you might as well have the robustness of something like NTFS or ext4.

 

[Shonk]

I generally use EXT2 if i need permissions for backups and such
and FAT32 if i dont

 

[steelskinz]

How could we use option argue like "noatime" with our firmware ? My etc/fstab is empty. Thanks

 

[bozolino]

@ ColinTaylor: very good link to Merlin's excellent post back there. And you're right, playback performance is certainly not my issue. I'm more concerned about

1. file copy performance. when i copy files between my NAS and the router i get capped at 20-30MB/s - which ist about 40% of what i get when i plug the stick directly into my mac. but this seems not to be related to the file system format but to the USB3 performance bottleneck of the 68U's hardware.

2. file system robustness. I initially started with ext.4 but after having to reformat my stick twice after hard router reboots i started to have doubt about it.

i've now switched to NFTS which seems to be robust enough and compatible with other platforms. FAT can't carry files >4GB, and ext2-4 seem to be too esoteric for me, and the possible performance gains are nixed by the limitation of my router's hardware.

 

[steelskinz]

How could we use option argue like "noatime" with our firmware ? My etc/fstab is empty. Thanks

No one for that ? Nobody mount ext4 on his router and speed the thing up with mount options ?