Hi

Im running Ubuntu Edgy 6.10 on a Nec Latitude Laptop.

Recently I had decided to try and do away with my usb drives as fat32 drives, on which I was storing all my media, and convert them to a format (ext3) more suitable for linux.

So in short, I backed up my files, formatted two of my drives to ext3, remounted and copied the files back.

DISAPPOINTMENT!! I have now found that when I watch the avi's there is always problems with delays. i.e. audio going out of sync with visual. Where as these files worked fine before. As a test I move several onto my remaining fat32 drive, only to find that they play fine.

What have I done wrong??? Why is the Ext3 drive performing worse than when it was vfat?? I thought Ext3 was meant to be better.
Am I mounting it the wrong way?? Please help I really dont want to go back to fat32.

Heres what I did (based on suggestions from various websites)

I unmounted my drives, and using "fdisk" I deleted the Fat32 partitions and recreated a linux partition suitable for ext3.
I then formatted the drives using

mke2fs -j -m 1 -L AUDIO /dev/sdh1
mke2fs -j -m 1 -L VISUAL /dev/sdi1

as the drives are for avi and mp3 storage only I decided to use "-m 1" to reduce the number of reserved blocks.
I decided to keep one of my drives as vfat for the time being.

That all went fine. Then I remounted the drives by setting /etc/fstab

/dev/sdh1 /media/AUDIO ext3 defaults 0 0
/dev/sdi1 /media/VISUAL ext3 defaults 0 0
/dev/sda1 /media/GENERAL vfat umask=000,uid=1000,gid=1000,auto,rw,nouser 0 0

Remounted them with no errors.

If I run "fdisk -l" I get

Disk /dev/sdb: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 1 30401 244196001 c W95 FAT32 (LBA)

Disk /dev/sdh: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdh1 1 30401 244196001 83 Linux

Disk /dev/sdi: 320.0 GB, 320072933376 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdi1 1 38913 312568641 83 Linux
ouser 0 0

As far as I know I havent done anything wrong, so I cant understand the performance drop.

Help!

There is nothing wrong with using FAT32. It if works better for your purposes then use it. You don't need to feel that using FAT32 is un-Linux-like. The "Linux way" is to do whatever works best.

If I were you I would go back to the FAT32 file system.

Well thats true! Why fix it if it aint broken.
One of the reasons I though it would be smart to move to ext3 is that I had read it was a little faster and safer than FAT32 in a linux environment. Now I am finding in case of the speed, I seem to be seeing the opposite.