Re: ext2 on flash memory

From: alan
Date: Mon Jun 11 2007 - 11:26:02 EST


On Mon, 11 Jun 2007, DervishD wrote:

Hi all :)

I was wondering: is there any reason not to use ext2 on an USB
pendrive? Really my question is not only about USB pendrives, but any
device whose storage is flash based. Let's assume that the device has a
good quality flash memory with wear leveling and the like...

Thanks a lot in advance :)

It depends...

Do you need to use OSes other than Linux? FAT16/32 seems to be a pretty universal filesystem at this point. You can mount ext2 on Windows, but it is a pain. Not certain what it takes to mount it on OS X.

I have encountered flash drives that do not format well for anything other than FAT16, but they were old and small. Hopefully that problem no longer exists with modern hardware. I would format it then test the hell out of it before trusting it with important data.

--
"ANSI C says access to the padding fields of a struct is undefined.
ANSI C also says that struct assignment is a memcpy. Therefore struct
assignment in ANSI C is a violation of ANSI C..."
- Alan Cox
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