ext3 vs ntfs

[lucian]

I have an 1.5 GB USB 3.0 drive on USB. Formated with ntfs I got write speeds of 15MB/s, with ext3 I only get 12 MB/s. (Samba -> 100% cpu load both)

Merlin wrote somewhere that Asus uses optimized ntfs driver.

But could they be rly faster than ext3 ?

 

[clintb]

I seem to remember Merlin writing that the Asus routers are using Linux, therefore the ext2/3 drivers are optimized for disks with that format. Conversely, NTFS support is not native and slower.

 

[lucian]

exactly, but I get faster rates with NTFS .....

 

[DrTeeth]

exactly, but I get faster rates with NTFS .....

Will ext4 work?

DrT

 

[ryzhov_al]

exactly, but I get faster rates with NTFS .....

Yes, because Asus bought commercial Paragon's NTFS driver which is fast as a native Linux Ext3. Even bit faster then Ext3.

Still, you can't do many common Linux things on NTFS. The choice is yours:

• if USB drive is used only to store torrent/dlna content then NTFS may fits better because of Windows compatibility.
• if you plan to install additional programs via Entware/Optware then use Ext3.

Will ext4 work?

No. Our kernel is too old for Ext4. I know only one firmware which is backported Ext4 successfully — Oleg's firmware. Here is a minimal list of patches to get Ext4 working (first approach):

• r3580,
• r3627,
• r3700,
• r3708,
• r3720,
• r3726,
• r3740,
• r3768,
• r4043,
• r4044,
• r4045,
• r4189,
• r4249,
• r4297.

In other words, there is a lot of work to do, and really lot of test has to be done. But it's worth hard working: there will be no fragmentation at all! Here is my example to get +28% performance boost after defragmentation.

 

[RMerlin]

My past experiences with Paragon's NTFS driver are less than stellar. On the WDTV they were an endless source of headache and disk corruption. I also had a weird interaction involving Samba, the Paragon driver, and the way disks were mounted. Performance when writing a large file would be abysmal, until the disk was unmounted, and remounted again.

Asus uses a newer version than WD (8.6 vs 8.5). Thankfully, so far I haven't seen any report of massive disk corruption like the WDTV experienced. But I still prefer to entrust my data to ext3 when it comes to anything plugged to a Linux box.

 

[ryzhov_al]

My past experiences with Paragon's NTFS driver are less than stellar

BTW, Andy Padavan (RT-N56U alt f\w author) reports about ufsd bug: NTFS partition can't be exported via NFS, we need to check this out.

 

[RMerlin]

BTW, Andy Padavan (RT-N56U alt f\w author) reports about ufsd bug: NTFS partition can be exported via NFS, we need to check this out.

I vaguely remember reading something about how it only worked with some specific versions of ufsd. I can't remember which one however.

 

[ryzhov_al]

BTW, Andy Padavan (RT-N56U alt f\w author) reports about ufsd bug: NTFS partition can be exported via NFS, we need to check this out.

* can't

Sorry for misspelling.