[face=courier]On 29-03-2004 02:02:59 +0000 OliverPA wrote:
O> I apologize for responding to you as I had already noticed
O> your aggressive attitude towards posters with differing
O> oppinions - I should've known better.
Well, apology accepted.[/face]
Very slow copies when using USB Flash drive
Moderators: Hacker, petermad, Stefan2, white
[face=courier]The Protoss do NOT run from their enemies.
It is here, that we shall make our stand.[/face]
It is here, that we shall make our stand.[/face]
1) Usually the FAT family of filesystems is faster than the more complicated NTFS, however this also depends on the characteristics of the files stored on the volume, eg. reading/writing of small files should favor NTFS as it can store the data within the MFT entry, thus eliminating the need to seek the to another position on the volume (less of a concern on non-mechanical devices as usb-sticks). Also searching is much faster on NTFS volumes because the directories content is once again stored within the MFT entries.Janus wrote: 1 - If your PC is NTFS, can achieve the same performance in transfer speed with your flash drive if you format it as FAT32 than if you format it as NTFS?
2 - Can you use 100% of capacity with FAT32?
3 - Why do you use a 512k allocation unit size?
2) All filesystem based on fixed-size sectors exhibit some kind of wasted space when storing files who's size is not a multiple of the sector size. Add to that the space needed for the data management. Generally large sectors have the disadvantage of wasting more space for files with a big discrepancy between their size and the sector size, while small sectors add a burden on the file management as more sectors have to be remembered. The ideal size depends once again on the type of data that is to be stored. NTFS has other advanced features besides storing small files within the MFT such as compression of files (sometimes highly effective, mostly not, though) which only works with a sector size of 4kb and sparse files which don't allocate space for sectors containing nothing but zero's.
3) Contrary to NTFS you need to use bigger sectors to allow for bigger volumes when using FAT, but this is probably not needed in this case as we're talking about usb-sticks.
PS: NTFS, which I'm clearly a fan of
, has one other characteristic: Though using it for many years I haven't managed to lose any files due to filesystem corruption - quite contrary to my experiences with the FAT's. NTFS's data recoverability is really quite robust for everday tasks.
