best filesystem for usb thumbdrive...

[jhu]

...in terms of flash longevity. most of these drives are formatted as vfat, but i've heard that this isn't as efficient in terms of writing.

 

[aka1nas]

Well I think you may be stuck in FAT if you want to be able to use it among mutliple platforms. Wouldn't the higher level functions of NTFS like journalling cause more wear on the flash memory? I am not familiar enough with any of the *nix File systems to say which would be good among them, but you would lose easy compatability with windows going that route.

 

[asb002]

I would say leave it at vfat.

 

[ProviaFan]

FAT, FAT32, or "vfat" as it's called in *NIX, is your best choice for such removable media, due to almost universal compatibility, and less wear on the flash memory than what a journaled FS (NTFS, ext3, XFS, etc.) would cause.

 

[drag]

I'd stick with fat.

Since your going to be using it 95% for read only the chances of corruption are pretty small and fat is pretty much universally recognized.

Plus you don't want to mess with permissions and stuff like that.

As long as your not using it as a swap partition/file then those flash drives will last for a 10,000 writes (or something like that) and work well for at least 3-5 years of continous use.

If you want something that will have a longer life (if you don't knock things around) you can go get a 20gig laptop HD for about 50 bucks and stick it in a USB/firewire drive encloser. That way you get big storage in a package that you can fit in your pocket (not that you'd want too, bang bang is bad bad on HDs) You get a modern super-low-power drive then you can run it off of one USB cord, but mine requires 2 USB ports to work or one cord to plug into the wall and one USB port. So it's not as conveinent as flash drives.

 

[jhu]

that's nice, but i can't exacltly place the harddrive + enclosure on my keyring. well, looks like it's vfat for now