best filesystem for usb flash drive linux

Live booting will give you the best experience.

Or these generic instruction which handle any bootable CD image: How to Create Ubuntu Live USB in Windows Test out the Ubuntu desktop experience without touching your PC configuration No need to worry about the filesystem.įollow the regular official Ubuntu instructions here: Create a bootable USB stick on Windows. This will be the fastest setup for a pendrive. To persist data you can simply mount the location you want to write to. Data is then not persisted between restarts. This will boot into memory and only read from the pendrive. Originally made for use for CD boot this can be used for USB drives as well. The (slow) speed of the pen drive is the limiting factor. The difference is negligible in your situation. However this approach will mean your pen-drive linux will no-longer boot on any machine, only yours. This will let you put frequently changing areas of your file system ( /var and /home) onto your Windows PC and keep them away from your USB drive. You can create a large single file on your main Windows hard drive and then use it as a loopback device, (that file can be used like a hard drive). If you are still concerned about wear then you might want to do something a little funky with your setup: make the windows PC hard-drive host part of your file-system. Ext4 is designed to be very hard to corrupt so when the time comes you're unlikely to lose data if you formatted with ext4. Think about whether or not you really care about spending another $10 in a year or two.Ī lot of the better usb flash drives (well known brands with a reputation to maintain) will fail into read-only mode.

It will depend on you and how much money you have. Quite often you don't need to worry though. This was designed to reduce flash wear and importantly designed to spread flash wear. F2FS is your better option (Yes I realise it wasn't in your question). If you use it heavily then you will eventually wear out a USB drive where you might not ever wear out of a hard drive. That's because USB flash drives have very low 'seek time', running Ubuntu from a flash drive is pretty smooth.Īs for wearing out a flash drive, this is more of a problem. This means that slow down due to reading data on disk is much less than you might expect when compared to spinning hard drives. This may speed up the otherwise slower file system considerably at the expense of CPU.Ī big proportion of OS IO is based on small file reads. For example btrfs supports transparent file compression. However benchmarks test quite narrow parameters which may not be reflected by running an OS. The benchmark I linked attributes this to copy-on-write behaviour of btrfs. I've seen benchmarks (eg: this one) that put btrfs considerably slower than ext4.

Best filesystem for usb flash drive linux