does a fat32-filesystem affect linux' performance!?

regards
ungua

What do you mean by linux performance?

Linux is a kernel... and its performance is probably slightly affected by the system on which it is installed, because that is where it will be read when you will boot into linux. Once booted, your kernel is in memory and so no problemo!

If by linux you meant the whole "unix-like" operating system environment in which we work, and how the speed or reading/writing on FAT32 will be on this linux system, let me tell you it will not be worse (if not better) than that in Windows.

Actually, FAT32 is THE old filesystem, and every operating system supports it. But it was not good enough so Microsoft developed NTFS, and others developed ext2, ext3, reiserfs, xfs, jfs and so on...

FAT32 is the least common factor, so it will run on everything. If you use anything else, it will work on something and will not on otherthings...

As it follows from FAT32 being the so old, it is not an advanced filesystem.

There is nothing dependent on your os being linux or windows regarding your filesystem being FAT32.

PS: As a side note, reiserfs is a good and modern filesystem. With some trouble (installing some drivers), you can actually read/write to it from Windows too. If that is more trouble, you can go for ext3 (there are better programs available to access ext3). And if you go for FAT32, there IS NO problem whatsoever (except poor performance because of it being really old).

Hope that clears (I am a little drunk right now)

thank you for your very good post, anupamsr! i went for fat32 and i did not create any partitions, all the 232,4 gb of the "250 gb" labelled freecom-hdd are just one large fat32 partition. transfer speed through a 5m active usb-cable to a hub and then to the hdd is at 3-9mb/s, depends on whether i have other usb-stuff like my camera connected. the camera then will have a speed of 800kb/s, mounted as "usbdisk". this is not fast, but it works.

regards & thank you for all help
ungua

p.s.: i am running the system backup from yast, it looks as if it compresses the files on my notebook's hdd first even though i told the program to do everything on the external hdd. have i done something wrong!?

No idea about yast Not working on Suse

It was not coined after the invention of the Internet. It was in use in the 1970's, two decades before the Internet was opened to the public. It may be even older than that.

Similarly, the use of the word "bugs" to describe flaws in design or implementation predates the invention of computers by decades at least. I distinctly remember my father explaining why he did not buy the Hydramatic option on his 1940 Oldsmobile: "I'll wait a couple years 'til they get the bugs worked out."

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Oh... I didn't knew that. My sig comes from the fact listed here: http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/N/newbie.html

Any references you have? Then may be we can correct the bug at the source.

The short answer is no, no specific references, only recollections. Raymond may well be correct about its derivation from "new boy" and is almost certainly correct about its gaining currency on Usenet. I probably picked it up from Dr. Dobb's Journal, some of whose contributors were users of Usenet. DDJ has recently released a DVD of all its archived issues. You may be able to find it there.

I'm sure you realize that Usenet originated on (D)ARPAnet long before there was an Internet.

I recall inferring (when I encountered it in the 1970's) that some of the people who used it were trying to conceal the fact that they could not spell "hobbyist".

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