Partitioning differences?

Story: What's The Fastest Linux Filesystem On Cheap Flash Media?Total Replies: 5
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vainrveenr

Oct 28, 2010
2:30 PM EDT 		North demonstrates in this piece that Ext4 is the fastest Linux filesystem on cheap flash media -- and presumably his test results include commodity USB pen/thumb drives as well. North concludes this in the following 'Interoperability' section at http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/tutorials/7208/2/
Quoting:If you're only using your flashtoy on one linux computer or only trading among linuxboxen, no problem. Use Ext4.

For Apple, Linux can read and write HFS+ just fine, but on two Snow Leopard installs it was extremely slow writing the kernel directory (one test took over two hours!) The same run on VFAT took a bit over seven minutes. Stick with VFAT.

Windows? There's a good argument for experimenting with NTFS, but most of the time VFAT will suffice.


Now how about partitioning stats with the likes of cfdisk, sfdisk, or the standard fdisk using standard partition-types ?? (For more information on xdisk types, please refer to 'Partition types: List of partition identifiers for PCs' found at http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/partitions/partition_types-1.html )

Partition type 83-Linux would be used for Ext4 fs. Partition type af-MacOS X HFS would be used by Apple for the MacOS X filesystem HFS or HFS+ fs on Intel. Partition type 07-HPFS/NTFS would seem to be appropriate for NTFS fs in the majority of cases, but other NTFS-specific types such as 17-Hidden HPFS/NTFS, 86-NTFS volume set, and 87-NTFS volume set are possible as well.

OTOH, one can easily see, even by using the standard fdisk, that there are numerous VFAT-capable partition types. E.g., * 06- FAT16 * 0b- W95 FAT32 * 0c- W95 FAT32 (LBA) * 0e- W95 FAT16 (LBA) * 16- Hidden FAT16 * 1b- Hidden W95 FAT32 * 1c- Hidden W95 FAT32 (LBA) * 1e- Hidden W95 FAT16 (LBA) ... and this particular VFAT-capable * list excludes FAT12 and FAT16 partitions with 16MB or less capacities. This leaves the question; Which partition type(s) for VFAT is(are) the fastest or the "best" for flash media ?? Do all of these partitioning schemes perform equally well and are they all fully interoperable with the VFAT fs as implemented on flash media ??
jdixon

Oct 28, 2010
2:47 PM EDT 		Well, if you're willing to run the tests, I'm sure Scott would love to publish the results.
Scott_Ruecker

Oct 28, 2010
4:14 PM EDT 		I second that! ;-)
hkwint

Oct 28, 2010
4:57 PM EDT 		I'm not sure if all these types are of any use, I think only if 'mkfs.vfat' supports them.

Cannot find LBA nor 'hidden' in "man mkdosfs", number of bits can be handled with -F.

Also says: "-h Select the number of hidden sectors in the volume. Apparently some digital cameras get indigestion if you feed them a CF card without such hidden sectors, this option allows you to satisfy them."
vainrveenr

Oct 28, 2010
5:53 PM EDT
Quoting:I'm not sure if all these types are of any use, I think only if 'mkfs.vfat' supports them.

Cannot find LBA nor 'hidden' in "man mkdosfs", number of bits can be handled with -F.
One of the first Google hits that comes up for 'man mkdosfs' is NetSurf's found at http://linux.die.net/man/8/mkfs.vfat

A further question of which partitioning and formatting is most suitable for bootable flash drives arises from within this very 'man mkdos' documentation. As the NetSurf piece author quotes near the end:
Quoting:Bugs mkdosfs can not create bootable filesystems. This isn't as easy as you might think at first glance for various reasons and has been discussed a lot already. mkdosfs simply will not support it ;) Author Dave Hudson; modified by Peter Anvin. Fixes and additions by Roman Hodek for Debian/GNU Linux.
Programmer H. Peter Anvin is, of course, the primary maintainer of SYSLINUX, THE de facto "boot loader for the Linux operating system which runs on an MS-DOS/Windows FAT (read as a VFAT) filesystem". Further information on Anvin's SYSLINUX is found at http://syslinux.zytor.com/wiki/index.php/SYSLINUX .
joel

Oct 28, 2010
5:53 PM EDT 		Hmmm. Just read a thread yesterday evening that warned of the hazards of using cheap SD cards. Has some very interesting info on the relative merits of Sd vs. SDHC cards. Ref: http://www.vansairforce.com/community/showthread.php?p=47945...

Interested, I did a search for SDHC cards on google and found a comparison test on http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/sdhc-memory-card,2143.ht... that I found to be quite enlightening. Best regards.

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