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Old 08-17-2005, 12:32 PM   #1
MikeyCarter
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USB Storage and which files system is best?


I bought a USB 3.5 enclosure and put a 200 Gig drive in it. When I was first formatting it I found that the only FS that worked (ie didn't corrupt the entire FS on large transfers) was XFS.
I mostly found I needed to use rsync --bw_limit to transfer with out killing something.

I'm now in a stage where I was playing mp3's from it and the drive hiccuped on a write. Now the entire XFS seems to be unrecoverable. (I can't mount, xfs_repair... everthing fails)

So what's the best FS to use on these things? I get the feeling I overload the USB when doing large transfers which cause the filesystems to get corrupted. But I'm only guessing.
 
Old 08-17-2005, 01:34 PM   #2
ronban
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best fs for large files is ext3 .. it uses journaling too...
 
Old 08-22-2005, 05:00 AM   #3
basileus
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Does the enclosure(?) support USB storage correctly? If usb-storage drivers work as they should, you should not have any problems, no matter what filesystem you are using.

I've used USB memory sticks (with vfat fs) and I've had no problems with them - I'm not sure about the harddrives, though.
 
Old 08-22-2005, 06:06 AM   #4
imitheos
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Re: USB Storage and which files system is best?

Quote:
Originally posted by MikeyCarter
I bought a USB 3.5 enclosure and put a 200 Gig drive in it. When I was first formatting it I found that the only FS that worked (ie didn't corrupt the entire FS on large transfers) was XFS.
I mostly found I needed to use rsync --bw_limit to transfer with out killing something.

I'm now in a stage where I was playing mp3's from it and the drive hiccuped on a write. Now the entire XFS seems to be unrecoverable. (I can't mount, xfs_repair... everthing fails)

So what's the best FS to use on these things? I get the feeling I overload the USB when doing large transfers which cause the filesystems to get corrupted. But I'm only guessing.
Maybe the chipset the enclosure has is not fully supported. As basileus mentioned if the enclosure works correctly, the choice of
the filesystem has nothing to do with it.

If you use this disk only to transport large files (e.g downloaded movie files) then XFS is a good choice.It is much quicker than
the others when dealing with large files.
ext3 on the other hand is recognised on pretty much every linux (or bsd or solaris or whatever) box you will put it.

Since this is a 200gb disk, i recommend a small vfat (fat32) partition in case you go to a friend who has only windows and the
rest of the disk ext3 for the reason i mentioned above.

If you will only use this disk on your box then i suggest XFS.

P.S A word of caution. Don't trust a USB hard disk for valuable data.
 
Old 08-22-2005, 06:08 AM   #5
tribalmasters
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I use vfat on mine too, that way it is compatible with the Microsoft Windows operating system, very useful for that MP3 you really want and know it will be impossible to find again!

--EDIT--
It was FAT 32 formatted on an XP machine, a laptop drive of about 40gig
 
  


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