[gentoo-user] Reformat/repartition USB flash drive to ext2/3?

[gentoo-user] Reformat/repartition USB flash drive to ext2/3?

[Kevin O'Gorman]

I am annoyed with using vfat on my USB flash drives because I cannot
get proper permissions and ownership.  Not for the security (meaningless
on a drive that easy to steal, unless encrypted), but annoying anyway.

Is there any technical reason I should not repartition it as something else
-- ext3 or xfs, say -- and allow executables and such?

++ kevin

-- 
Kevin O'Gorman, PhD
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Re: [gentoo-user] Reformat/repartition USB flash drive to ext2/3?

[Ryan Tandy]

Kevin O'Gorman wrote:
> I am annoyed with using vfat on my USB flash drives because I cannot
> get proper permissions and ownership.  Not for the security (meaningless
> on a drive that easy to steal, unless encrypted), but annoying anyway.
> 
> Is there any technical reason I should not repartition it as something else
> -- ext3 or xfs, say -- and allow executables and such?
> 
> ++ kevin
> 

Most people format their flash drives as vfat for interoperability, 
since all the major operating systems can read from and write to vfat 
filesystems.  If you know you'll only be plugging it into Linux systems, 
then go right ahead.  As far as ownership goes, remember that [ug]ids 
are stored numerically on the device, so a file that's owned by your 
user on your system may well be owned by (random example) apache on 
someone else's.

I seem to remember reading somewhere that one shouldn't use a 
journalling file system on flash-based devices such as USB drives (i.e. 
you should use ext2 rather than ext3), but I can't find the reference 
right now.  Can anyone clarify this for me?
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Re: [gentoo-user] Reformat/repartition USB flash drive to ext2/3?

[Richard Fish]

On 11/18/06, Ryan Tandy <tarpman@tarpman.homelinux.com> wrote:
> I seem to remember reading somewhere that one shouldn't use a
> journalling file system on flash-based devices such as USB drives (i.e.
> you should use ext2 rather than ext3), but I can't find the reference
> right now.  Can anyone clarify this for me?

That is my understanding as well, because flash devices are only good
for so many writes before they fail, and journalling filesystems write
consistently to the same area for every metadata update.  So I would
go with ext2, and make sure to mount it with the noatime option.

-Richard
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