Optimizing Linux filesystems for cheap flash drives

Posted Feb 20, 2011 13:47 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: Optimizing Linux filesystems for cheap flash drives by alonz
Parent article: Optimizing Linux with cheap flash drives

That sounds like a good idea, as many of the rationales for positioning most of these things in the middle of the disk is to reduce seek time, which hardly matters on an SSD.

One downside, though: I suspect the FAT segment is (much) too small.

Optimizing Linux filesystems for cheap flash drives

Posted Feb 21, 2011 13:15 UTC (Mon) by mchazaux (guest, #64024) [Link] (3 responses)

Then do the opposite : add UID, GID, permissions and such to a FAT-like filesystem ;-)

Optimizing Linux filesystems for cheap flash drives

Posted Feb 21, 2011 15:21 UTC (Mon) by giggls (subscriber, #48434) [Link] (2 responses)

One apon a time there has been the UMSDOS filesystem which did exactly this. I'm unaware if this is still available in current kernels though.

Optimizing Linux filesystems for cheap flash drives

Posted Feb 21, 2011 19:36 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

No, it was removed some years ago.

Optimizing Linux filesystems for cheap flash drives

Posted Feb 21, 2011 19:37 UTC (Mon) by arnd (subscriber, #8866) [Link]

It's not, see the discussion about. I think we can do much better than FAT as well, even given the characteristics of the current drives. Ted Ts'o has some ideas for ext4, and my understanding of btrfs is that it does not rely on a specific block allocation at all, so that could be an excellent target as well.

Starting out a completely new file system designed only for SD cards would of course make it possible to get the best result, but that would also be an enormous amount of work.