11-09-2011, 05:20 PM
For the second set of questions ...
1) Well, FAT32 has some tunable parameters (clustersize,
number of allocation tables, size of root-dir, etc) however, none of them
has a considerable impact on performance today, as most OSes use
caches when reading (so the first read might be slow, consequtive reads
will be fast) and (if enabled) when writing. The last one (chached writting)
can turn out to be a little devil, if you do not properly eject a drive. Ejecting
the drive will force all cached pages to be written back to the device ... ripping
the device out of the USB port can indeed lead to inconsistencies. That is why
Windows will usually not enable write caching ... that way losses are less likely.
Once data is written properly to the drive, you will not lose anymore if you
eject the drive properly after use (and if there is no physical error on the drive).
2) If the limitations of FAT are not impacting your use of the drive, I would stick
with FAT, since it can be read on almost every type of computer. The type of filesystem
will not make a performance difference, since the bottleneck is the USB-connection itself.
3) If I remember correct, exFAT has some extensions to support flashdevices better.
It shouldn't have an impact, if a real harddisk is used.
Reliability of FAT ... FAT is not a journaled filesystem (like most modern filesystems are ...
NTFS, ext4, Reiser4, xfs, zfs, hfs and the like ). This means, it is more vulnerable to
inconsistencies when the power (or connectivity) is lost while writes to the device were
in progress. So, if you accidentially unconnected the device without ejecting it properly,
you might want to run chkdsk or scandisk on it before writting to it again.
Rainer
1) Well, FAT32 has some tunable parameters (clustersize,
number of allocation tables, size of root-dir, etc) however, none of them
has a considerable impact on performance today, as most OSes use
caches when reading (so the first read might be slow, consequtive reads
will be fast) and (if enabled) when writing. The last one (chached writting)
can turn out to be a little devil, if you do not properly eject a drive. Ejecting
the drive will force all cached pages to be written back to the device ... ripping
the device out of the USB port can indeed lead to inconsistencies. That is why
Windows will usually not enable write caching ... that way losses are less likely.
Once data is written properly to the drive, you will not lose anymore if you
eject the drive properly after use (and if there is no physical error on the drive).
2) If the limitations of FAT are not impacting your use of the drive, I would stick
with FAT, since it can be read on almost every type of computer. The type of filesystem
will not make a performance difference, since the bottleneck is the USB-connection itself.
3) If I remember correct, exFAT has some extensions to support flashdevices better.
It shouldn't have an impact, if a real harddisk is used.
Reliability of FAT ... FAT is not a journaled filesystem (like most modern filesystems are ...
NTFS, ext4, Reiser4, xfs, zfs, hfs and the like ). This means, it is more vulnerable to
inconsistencies when the power (or connectivity) is lost while writes to the device were
in progress. So, if you accidentially unconnected the device without ejecting it properly,
you might want to run chkdsk or scandisk on it before writting to it again.
Rainer