Am Sun, Feb 16, 2025 at 01:41:10PM +0000 schrieb Michael:
> On Sunday 16 February 2025 09:08:10 Greenwich Mean Time Nuno Silva wrote:
> > On 2025-02-16, Philip Webb wrote:
> > > 250215 Michael wrote:
> 
> > >> Formatting a 256GB USB drive, especially if it is a USB 3.0 or later
> > >> spec, should not take hours, but minutes if not seconds.
> > > 
> > > See listing below.  My notes tell me that in many previous cases,
> > > it has taken these rates to format :  2 :  6 min/GB  ; 3 :  1,8 min/GB ;
> > > today, it took  2 h 51 m  to format a  64 GB  partition (mainly inodes).
> 
> I just formatted a USB 2.0 8GB stick with mke2fs as a test.  It took 46 
> seconds.  Extrapolating for your 64GB partition it should take ~ 6 minutes.  A 
> full 256GB drive would take 24.5 minutes.  I expect a drive enjoying USB 3.0 
> transfer speeds to take way less than this.

Your expectations have some vague assumptions:
- the stick achieves full speed of its USB protocol
- it keeps that throughput over time
- the data written grows linearly with the FS size

USB sticks often have a bad thermal design and throttle down once they get 
hot. And hot they get, especially the high-speed ones.

If you are curious, use a program like dool or glances to observe the 
device’s actual write throughput during formatting. htop can show this, too, 
but you first need to add a display meter in its config.

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